I took off from Hyderabad on Saturday for Patna via Delhi. Loved Delhi's new T3 terminal. I would rate it as the second best airport in India after Shamshabad (I guess there is a bit of home state bias here). Flight to Patna was a good 90 minutes late. Finally landed in Patna. I disembarked from the plane and waited for the bus only to realise we have to walk across the tarmac to the terminal. A long time since I have done this at an airport. Once we got into the car, we had to head to the BSNL office in Patna to get some material for the bus. The first BSNL office we went to was the incorrect office and we finally found the correct office and collected the material. Patna is a different city altogether. You cannot make out it is a capital city. Did not see any fancy malls or a single sedan in the city. You see either small cars or mighty SUVs' but not a single sedan. The 'lal batti' cars are just like you see in the movies. The ambassadors have high beam lights on the top and antennas. A truly imposing stance. There seems to be a huge presence of women police in Patna. A lot of chowks were manned by a single male policeman and two policewomen. There was this sight in which a bike wanted to take a turn and a policewomen with a stern look told him to head straight and the driver goes 'yeah hai Bihar ki police.' If only Hyderabad police were as strict!
So now we were headed to Darbhanga. Google Maps showed the place to be 131 kilometres from Patna and so I figured it would be two hours. So you can imagine when my surprise when the driver said the travel would take a good 6 hours! We had to take the Mahatma Gandhi Setu over the Ganges to reach Darbhanga. Popularly known as Ganga Setu, it is the longest single river bridge in the world. As we crossed the Ganges, a river more than 8 kilometres in width, the Ganges was in short, beautiful. A sight to behold. Its just water but the width of the river and something in it just wants to make you stare at it forever. All through the journey over the bridge, I could not take my eyes off the Ganga. Coming back to the bridge, the bridge is made of some sort of suspension technology such that when you go over it and over certain connection sections, you can actually see the bridge move up and down as vehicles go over it. The bridge is under partial renovation and therefore only one lane was active, one of the reasons for the delayed length to Darbhagna. Another reason is that the National Highway was a complete mess. Hence it did take a good 6 hours before we reached Dharbanga. By this time it was around 10pm and we crashed to bed.
The next day was a holiday so we decided to cross the border into Nepal into a town called Janakpur. The most important historical reference to Janakpur is in the Hindu epic Ramayana, where Lord Rama's wife Sita Devi (also called Janaki) is said to have been the princess of Videha. There is a famed temple there called the Janaki Mandir and we decided to there for prayers. Now Google Maps showed Janakpur to be only 86 kilometres from Darbhanaga, a short 1 1/2 hours journey, so we were like why not? And so began the unforeseen adventure. As we approached State Highway 75, we were informed that the highway is flooded and cut off. So we had to turn back for a detour. All through the way, we saw sights of flooding due to ongoing heavy rains. Going back to Darbhanga, we decided to take National Highway 75, a much longer route. Half way through, there had been an accident between 2 trucks that had led to the highway being unusable. We then decided to take a detour through plenty of unknown villages to reach a place called Madhubani. From Madhubani we had to take State Highway 52 to take the road to Nepal. The state highways in Bihar are brilliantly maintained. A true testimony to the work Nitish Kumar has done. On the other hand, the national highways can barely be called roads, let alone highways, an example of the sorry state of the Central Government. So we sped along the State Highway all confident of reaching Nepal when suddenly we braked...the road ahead of us was cut off due to flooding....again! There were some armed security personnel along with Government officials surveying the damage. We asked them for an alternate route and they gave us a route via National Highway 104, a highway whose condition is so bad, we were unable to go over 20 kilometres per hour. All you see on National Highways are boards that say, 'Warning: Bridge in a dilapidated condition.' (pic attached). This is the short version. Using Google Maps, we navigated our way through the roads of rural Bihar. By the time we reached the Nepal border, it was 6:30pm. We had left Darbhanga at 10:30am. But we were relived we made it. The first check post was by Indian authorities. While they inspected the vehicles, I chatted with the guards to confirm if the main temple in Janakpur would be still open. They informed me that as it was Dussehra, the temple is open all throughout and in fact it is at night the main festivities and pujas would take place and Dussehra is the best time to be there. So after hearing this I was all pepped up. We approached the Nepal check post and only then did we learn that to cross the border, we needed the original vehicle registration papers to get the border crossing challan and we had only xerox papers with us. Strangely, the Nepal border force said that even though we didn't have the original papers, we could go ahead without registering the vehicle as every one does the same and they wouldn't stop us. However, we didn't want to do any thing unofficial and so chose to head back, much to the surprise of the Nepalese authorities.
As we headed back, we took the help of villagers to head back that saw us traveling on roads non-existent on Google Maps. These roads were not highways but interior village roads and the condition of these roads is praiseworthy. Nitish Kumar has constructed roads made of cement in the most remote areas of Bihar and in Hyderabad we still use tar roads that are far less reliable. As we headed back on these roads, we were cruising through the most rural parts of Bihar. We were surrounded by jungle with no man or vehicle in sight for miles together. It can get a bit scary when you find you are the only ones out there and you know you are in Bihar. However, when we did approach a village, as it is Dussehra, we found the village all decked up and all the villagers out on the street celebrating. The short cut roads saved us a good 4hrs and we reached Darbhanga back at around 11:00pm. The trip was not a waste as it showed me how the real India is living. As we passed villages inundated in floods, people with nothing to live by, you come to realise what a privileged class we are. We always do have that theoretical knowledge but when you see it in real life, it hits you hard.
Monday was our first day with the Google Internet Bus. The Internet Bus Project is an attempt to educate people in rural India about what the Internet is, and how it may be beneficial to their lives, by taking the Internet experience to them through a customised Internet-enabled bus. As I helped people get aware about the internet, the experience was a real eye opener for me. After educating people about the internet, we are to take a survey spanning a couple of questions. One of the questions is that if you have not used the internet so far, why? The answer seems so obvious. When I questioned one woman who had come with her three kids, she was like, I have three kids and getting food is difficult, how can I think about computers? Another old man around 75 years came to visit. He said that the previous regimes kept us so subdued and kept us away from education such that we never realised how the rest of the world has gone ahead. A lot of people when questioned how they would take this learning replied that though not for us, we will make sure our children start learning about the internet. There was this man who came with his two children with a very specific demand, teach my children how to use this internet. There was a teenager who came with an outdated Samsung handset with a request, I want to get Gmail on this phone. It took me some time but I was finally able to retrieve some article that explained me how I could achieve the same on his handset. The man was elated and could not thank me enough. Another incident was when a woman came with her daughter and spend considerable time hearing us out. Post the session, when I asked her how she would now use the internet, she was blank but her daughter of 15 shot back, 'business.' And just 5 minutes back, they didn't know what the internet was.
A man came up to me and said he was a clerk with the Border Roads Organisation (BRO). He wanted some information and his superior said the information was confidential. He wanted to file an RTI but was refused the form saying that it is not in stock. He wanted to reach the higher RTI authority. After a lot of searching, I was able to find a PDF document in Hindi that named the officer responsible for RTI applications for the zilla. The man noted the number down and was able to get through. He was very happy and later in the day came back with prasad from a nearby temple and was all praise for the work we were doing and how we were helping uplift the people of the area.
The most heart warming incident was when a blind man came up to the bus and asked us to explain to him about the internet. A couple of people were blank on what to show but I took him into the bus and explained to him every thing I could and told him how on Windows you now had accessibility options that could read out information to you. He later told me he knows that he cannot see, but he wanted to know what the internet is all about. I continued to speak to him to learn his story. He was born blind and in Darbhanga there is a Darbhanga Blind School. He completed his 10th and 12th from there and proceeded to Delhi to become a teacher through a special school for the blind. He came back to Darbhanga and teaches normal school going kids poetry and literature. He has Braille books to enable this. He was very happy with the fact that through a normal computer he could now listen to articles and his one request was that Google invent something that makes the internet accessible in an affordable way for the blind. It just made me so grateful that I had the gift of sight and over here, a man who has been born with such great challenges has gone through so much and even today cares for others.
It has been a great 3 days so far and I am looking to meet many more people in the next 2 days and doing my bit to empower my fellow citizens of the glorious Republic.
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