Chandigrah --- Bhopal --- Chennai. the journey continues.

After a brief cup of coffee you want to read something. You shrug the newspaper off after peeping through a couple of stories and finding them about the same old stuff. Sex, violence, threats and politics. You look out of the window and see the trail of the city calling you bye-bye. You are back into the countryside. Speed is picking up and it feels that it's hot outside. Suddenly you get the feeling that you are in hills. Not the one with snow falls and deodar trees rather, it's the pale looking hills of Chattisgarh symbolising the hard life which the people living in this part go through every day. Endless spaces of trees without life and ground covered with sunburnt leaves. The color of soil is brown and i think they more resemble rocks. Few years back this use to be the part of Madhya Pradesh state and then a political storm was created over the mismanagement of funds alloted for tribal welfare. It took the shape of mass movement of Adivasis for the demand of a separate state. Well, after years of agitation and struggle they finally got their new state. Now, five years after the creation, the per capita almost remains the same, very few investment opportunities were created and the first chief minister and his son became famous for dirty political gimmicks.

The rocks standing in the background tells you the story of the life here which is always demanding and posing new challenges to you. You bow your head to the gritty and hard working Adivasi and your train takes you further. Small green plants appear in the background. You spot a tractor ploughing the field and maybe the workers are singing a song. I ask one of my fellow passenger and he tells me that these are orange trees and a lot of migrant workers come here to work as farm help. They bring with them the memories of their land and their songs for every ocassion: peace, pain and hopes. This is Maharashtra. Nagpur is arriving.

The train stays in Maharashtra for a brief period only and you see the factories built to take the advantage of the railway network and then slowly it drifts into Andhra. It's really a long long journey ahead. You first travel Andhra from west to east and then north to south along the coastline. YOu see lakes, fisheries, kids playing in the dusk, and then coconut trees fading in the background. I have never been to Hyderabad but since the last few years have followed a lot of news stories about how Hyderabad changed from a Biryani destination to the cyber savvy town Cyberabad. Well the very thought that comes to your mind about Andhra is that "it has changed". You imagine village people using laptops to check the market prices of agricultural commodities, you think about the students finding it easy to pick up their dream jobs, you think about the sheer number of institutes for professional education that has been built here in the recent years. Suddenly you stop thinking because what you see is completely different from your imagination. Here also you see a kid selling pea nuts with his mother and when you ask him something, he says " No Hindi, No English, Telgu." My fellow passenger who is an old man in his late fifties tells me that this is also the place where largest number of farmers commit sucide due to failed crops. Due to liberal policies of the govt. a large number of micro credit companies have flourished in the region and they sometime even take the land as gurantee for the credit. When the crop fails and the farmer is unable to repay the loan, the only option left to him is to sell his land to the crediting agency and then commit sucide. The train crosses over a bridge. The river is almost dry. I imagine about one such widow and then try to correlate it with that women selling peanuts with her 6-7 years old son. Does she have any other options?

It's nine in the night. I want to sleep but, memories of the day keep coming back and i am again staring out of window looking to see some light. The train is now running along the shore, gasping for some fresh air, he too have seen much. I doze off into a sleep.