India trip 2025

 This trip has been difficult at the onset due to personal problems and I carried some emotional burden traveling with some unresolved issues from home. Sometimes we have to compartmentalise life and to leave our negative thoughts and emotions behind and as my 10 yr old says be in the moment. The past if it keeps coloring your affective immediate response to what you see will not allow you to experience the full range of response to current stimuli and sometimes makes you feel hopeless and cynical. With that in mind I will try to jot down things as I see them. Creative thought may be at an ebb, but will try what I can.

A winter snowstorm delayed take off from IAD. 

I am getting older -that’s a fact but the physical effect of that manifests when you start noting that your body seems to show signs that you associate with aging folk. My hip, knee and back made it abundantly clear of this on a 13 some hour flight to Dubai which got delayed in Dubai due to the snow storm. I took an Uber the night earlier so I could make it to the airport. Stayed at the Courtyard in Herndon, but could not catch much sleep. Woke up unrefreshed and thought maybe I can catch some sleep on the flight . Despite the flight not being full and an empty middle seat it was hard to catch 40 winks. Ended up watching Eisenhower, a doc series on Vegas and Barbie. Felt 3 meals was a bit too much and was bloated gassy and polyuric with a throbbing subliminal migraine.

Dubai airport was kitschy glitzy and felt like a upmarket fish market with gold and expensive perfume and watches peddled in your face like fish and vegetables by expat blue collar Asian employees who try to bring their sales smarts to high end goods. Transit was an Indian bank like experience with people jostling to get ahead. 3 more hours in a middle seat to Mumbai.

The best airport in the world was crowded but no complaints. They had people asking passengers to verify baggage tags on baggage claim, which may be a need perhaps in a crowded airport like Mumbai . Travelling back to Pune by KK travels was revisiting the old journey so often taken in the past. Being so physically exhausted though I just felt the jostling of the incessant traffic and blaring cacophony of car/scooter horns overwhelmed and inhibited the visual sensory flow and were an interlude I wished would end soon.

Traffic plaza on way to Pune at 11 PM

We parked for a cuppa chai at the truck stop but I had no cash to get any coffee/tea or snack. The parade of trucks on the Ghat section of the highway held us up and navigating the maze of parallelly arrayed trucks made for display of some interesting driving skills by our driver and it seemed at times I was seeing a video game player wielding a joystick and not a steering wheel. Everybody is trying to get ahead but there is no blood shed or teeth gnashed if a faster car flashes its blinkers and cuts you in your lane. If it were an occasional event you would but these things are passe.

Chatted with a ISKCON devotee who was an engineer in California but left his job for what he called a divine calling and was spending time at a meditation retreat in Mayapur. As the conversation moved ahead I sensed his tendency to frame everything in a God/religion/spiritualism context and promoting surrender to the Lord. I had my differences of opinion but was not in the mood for a debate. I let Krishna be the supreme omniescient being in that second row of car seats for that time.

Pavers on sidewalk uprooted by growing
roots of trees

Pune is very changed. I corrected that- it is evolving and I have been static in my view of what my home town looks like or should look like. It is perhaps evolving at break neck speed where the head keeps surging ahead and the body falls back not being able to keep pace. The road traffic spills over into the side walks,the uneven pavers on the sidewalk stick out like Lego pieces, the signage for luxury condos and garbage on the street share an uncomfortable live in relationship,the dust swept by the street cleaner and the vapors of the oil from the street vendors cart where Batata vadas swirl to a golden brown and multitudinous chatter sound frequencies between people and their paramours and their cellphones and the waves of 5G and LTE all intermingle into an unholy weather cloud that floats some 4-12 ft from the dusty sidewalk and envelops the pedestrian. With all the 2 wheelers and cars packing the road like an oversized pregnancy and carts and parked vehicles taking up the sidewalk real estate the pedestrian is the forgotten inhabitant of the street ecosystem. I say this not as a firang, but even for someone who has lived in Pune for years, crossing the street is not safe, let alone difficult. I feel for the safety of my elderly parents who may not be able to swerve or move quickly to avoid a motorcycle sensei who may be practising their motoGP skills while rushing for a client meeting somewhere in the high rise offices nearby or a delivery deadline for a Swiggy meal. My partners in trying to cross a crazy Kalyani nagar road were daily labourers at the end of their shift. They waited patiently for an opening in the constant tandem boluses of vehicles , we shared a silent stare stuck in this journey to the other side. When there was an opening, a raised hand to indicate their existence, a quick dart to the middle and a lather rinse repeat ritual performed at the Center divider while vehicles whizzed in front of you and behind you while you remained stationary waiting for your turn , except you had to take it than be given one. For them it was probably a daily dose of social deprivation. The ads for luxury condos starting 2.6 cr and the many expensive food joints stood on one side of the road. On the other side a street dweller just emerged with an empty pail from the bushes through a crack in the wall which ran along the sidewalk having relieved themselves with probably no other sanitary place nearby. Not far down the road on the wall is a peeling poster with an image of the supreme leader who had championed the cause of “swacch Bharat” .

This is a wheel that turns and turns. For an outside observer like me, with intermittent exposures to this place, time and its effect on space play out a drama of progressive revelation and the plot lines are linear and galloping along like bullet trains or the hyperloop and what was a snapshot in your past in this time space continuum is irrelevant now and your points of reference are always irrelevant. This is a Lagrangian frame of reference and not a Eulerian one.

Dust is like the Lord in India. It is everywhere. It is in the oil, 5G/LTE, chat cloud that sits in the odoriferous zone of the pedestrian. It is on window sills and scooter seats; it coats the leaves of the Champa tree and forms brown lines on the dorsa of your feet where the straps of the Hawaii chappal make contact, the soles of your feet when you are chappalless inside the house. It even makes your snot a dark black gob of putty . When it rains this dust becomes the earthy odor of petrichor, when COVID ravaged the country this dust carried spores of Mucorales which led to the surge of black fungus cases at the peak of the pandemic. The mother of the house sweeps and sweeps trying to control the dust but is playing a losing game. Like the Krishna the dust always has a trick up its sleeve or a place to hide and keeps coming back. The mother never tires. The post viral cough keeps persisting, the allergies don’t go away. The dusty bus spews exhaust burnt of sulfurated diesel into the suspended dust. Inside on a dusty seat I sit thinking of how to make peace. Perhaps we have already done that. The default defence mechanism is the Indian way of Chalta hai which through resignation assigns primacy to fate over action/change and engenders a passivity or subsumption to what happens around you. We have assigned the name of the object to the verb for cleaning up the object. We are formed of dust and we end in the dust.

Dust into dust and under the dust to lie…….. sans everything.

Mailboxes at H5 Mantri Aangan.
They are barely used and many of these tenants have since moved out

I have previously raved about the liberation by data revolution in India. Data is king. Data is cheap.Data is bhagya vidhata. Data has meant your Uber rickshaw wala can use google maps to take you to your destination while you look up menus of restaurants there and accept payment with no cash or cards exchanging hands and catch up on the cricket match live streaming on wireless. The elderly parent can pay bills on their phone, order cleaning supplies and WhatsApp call their children who are travelling in another country in another time zone and not worry about roaming rates. They make point of care interventions easy to deploy, text message communications efficient for implementation science and give real meaning to the idea of World Wide Web. Data in India is cheaper and more accessible with great penetration of cellphones in most urban and semi urban areas. This enables data equals knowledge and knowledge equals power process enabling social mobility. If only people stopped making TikToks !

I have eaten murungaka sambar, tomato rasam, rice( non basmati), mixed veg kootu, methi bhaji and idlis for brekkie, lunch and dinner for the last 3 days. Nothing to rave about but the contentment from eating the food you grew up with is unrivalled. I have often had arguments with my wife about where the usual theme is ‘ whose cooking is better or whose xxx dish is better-your mother’s or mine’. Get a culinary expert and they will probably rate my wife’s dish better probably. However you crave the experience of eating the sambar rasam or kootu you grew up eating, where you could fling your satchel after you got home and dig into some , that satisfied the hunger you came home with; or the pav bhaji which was awaited with bated breath on a Sunday because it was your treat and quenching the anticipation was the dominant feeling, not satiation of hunger; the water masala /bharli vaangi of Sunday morning brunches because it reminds you of the roti eating competitions with your sibling. It’s really not the taste but the experiences and emotions tied to the food. I only wish my wife would agree. I spent a significant time during my early school days at my grandmother’s place and her cooking was staple during my very early formative years , and the experiences from my time at 42 rasta peth have elevated paati’s cooking in my mind to my most craved ever. Was it unhealthy? Hell yeah. But was it fingerlickin fabulous!

Food that pleases still is also the street food of the previous years. This is bhel at Interval bhel house or samosa at Laxmi sweet home, beetroot cutlet at Priya restaurant."Aade taste irukku innum", the parents say. I don't disagree. They couldn't have improved it.

Pune has its share of amrututulyas which dispense sugary cups of cutting chai.
 I would never drink such a sugary concoction otherwise

Bhel at Interval Bhel house with amma/appa

When you travel home years apart the aging of your parents seems more apparent- you see it as the waddling gait, the very apparent kyphus, and their slow to get up and go responses , the coarse dry skin, bony knobbiness around their knees. You also see it in inattention to their physical health or vanity. Somewhere the minutes spent on daily morning walks has dropped, the flab around the belly has unavoidably grown, toenails are thick and overgrown, somewhere while walking together you realize your father is 10 steps behind and you wait for him to catch up. They cook the same delicious tasting food, but the utensils bear grime- their arthritic osteoporotic arms cannot scrub hard enough or sweep enough or dust enough. And the dust settles in. Also settling in is fatigue. With a limited set of things to do or accomplish, time expands and hours are sometimes spent looking at the roof imagining patterns or life pass by outside the windows or inane TV shows or reels forwarded by similarly bored folks. Time becomes morning to evening. You try to reason about why watch the hopeless shows full of loud melodrama- what is the point of it? But then they ask, is it better than having no point at all? While it is easy to fall prey to an us them framing of this, what I realize, in my fifth decade of life is that we are all on this curve somewhere - we are aging, they are aging, we all are aging. We just need to slow down. Sometimes this slowing down means slowing yourself to let your arthritic father walk alongwith, or spending more time with them.

Snap on day of departure

On the many early morning walks or bike rides my companions on sparsely peopled streets were street dogs. I had perhaps forgotten how ever present they are on streets in India. Or perhaps Pune has really had an increase in their numbers. I remember them as a menace when they would chase me as I used to bike down from Max Mueller Bhavan after late night German class along what used to be a very deserted North Main road/KP with only a graveyard and ABC farms along that stretch of road then. This was 30 some years ago. The roads now are littered with tall glass faced buildings with corporate offices, hotels, fancily named eateries, tea shops, pharmacies, 2 wheelers leaning on each other for every inch of roadside space. And dogs find their space on the sidewalks. When the shops are shuttered and the bikes and bikeriders have gone, they gather together lazing around. A mother will herd her litter. When you invade their zone, perhaps a pack will follow you. Perhaps if you get excited chase you. It reminds you of the travails of trying to figure out how to avoid the pack around the graveyard near NM road years back. But they seem more mellowed to this coexistence now. Or perhaps you don’t fear them as much now. Knowing how social these animals are you want to stare back at their inquiring eyes to say yes I can speak or give you a treat, but then you also don’t want that extra baggage. Having seen how scary rabies can be and having had a scary exposure to a patient with rabies and facing prospect of a fatal illness there is a healthy measure of hesitation. These dogs aren’t rabid and seem to want to be friends, but it seems to be one of those want to can’t do things. A litter of pups play along a sidewalk on magarpatta city. I try to snap a photo, but the mother comes at me aggressively trying to check what I am doing . I walk away making peace.

One of the evenings, I visited friends at DMH hospital. Some of them were able to find time to chat with me while grabbing a snack in the hospital canteen. We also met for dinner at a roof top restaurant later that week. These discussions eventually funnel into how things were in college, which batch who was in , weird habits of teachers, funny things that batch mates did, who had a fling on whom and where we are now, whose kids are doing how, how busy life is, new acquisitions etc. These are the brief stop growing moments. During that time everyone shared a joke and a laugh, was silly a bit and then went on about their lives.

The next day I met old friends for dinner
at a roof top restaurant in Erandawane

Traveled to Mumbai and visited Dhiraj at HN hospital
on Monday

I finally managed to submit my application for my Aadhar card - I had to travel to Nigdi because there were limited locations which accepted new applications. I took an early morning metro and thought I would be early and be done in an hour or so. However when I get there I realize there are people who have lined up since 7 AM to be the early bird. It seems there were only 10 new aadhar cards applications accepted per day. I was number 10 in that line. I thanked myself for making it just a few minutes early, taking the earlier train, choosing a rickshaw and not walking. While waiting interminably in line, I helped a couple who were of low literacy fill out their application forms. I was killing time awaiting my turn, but felt I did my bit of service. Job done.

The first weekend I managed to take the PMT bus from Shaniwarwada to Sinhagad. Was a good trek, but the place has become something of an outing for people on the weekend and I did not realize how crowded it would be. My mother freaked out because she could not reach me atop the hill due to poor network connectivity. I touched 24K steps that day which was my all time high.

Visuals of the metro from Shaniwarwada at dawn 

Had all sorts of company atop the hill

On the weekend we visited Bhajana madam. This was a regular on the weekly schedule growing up- either with tatha when the evenings were spent at 42 Rasta peth or early Maargazhai mornings after the bhajanai rounds singing and chanting touching base at temples around the Rasta peth area when I would be tasked with waving the ceremonial fan during Aarti and would get first dibs at piping hot ven pongal as prasad, or later in my life when ridden with angst and cynicism I would accompany my mother to Bhajana madam on Sat evenings trying to find meaning in faith while she performed archana in our names. This is a custom she carries out to date. I find peace in this small old temple that has been patched and refurbished many times over. ‘Madrasis’ who have stayed on in rasta peth make it their evening pit stop still. The locals may come for prasad or because of proximity. The kurukkal remembers me because my mother has had him perform archana in my name for so many years.

Visited St Vincent's on an early morning before school hours 

The small narrow lanes that lead to the temple were part of my evening loitering as and felt so big then. These streets where I have cycled aimlessly, eaten street food in, found corners to hide, and scavenged for matchbox labels and ice cream cup lids for tokens, got separated from family in during Shiralsheth and palkhi, fallen over and scraped a knee or elbow. Now shoe shops abound and old wadas have been replaced by concrete apartment buildings. I met Dileep and Kumar’s fathers at Bhajana madam. They are survivors while others from their generation and age have passed away. Perhaps their faith keeps them going. They looked shadows of their original selves, scrawny limbed with atrophied muscles. Their cataractous eyes search for sensory stimuli. People they don’t recognize or cannot make out entire faces of they assign names to what seem like Rorschach blots. And when a connection is made the joy emotion is undiminished and the mirthful smile, the drawing hug is unwavering. The temple is their workplace replacement. It gives them the social connection that becomes their purpose at this age.

The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42. DA was probably high on pot when he wrote this, but I am going to be a bit bold here and frame my time at 42 RP in this context. The age 5-18 defines or frames perspectives or responses to stimuli, shapes ideas, aspirations. You evolve into being an external beings from the internal confines of the mother’s embrace and father’s bracing arm. How i respond to life’s questions is influenced by how i learnt to respond when we were first faced with being in that position. We define events in life based on firsts. Many of the firsts occurred during this time. The typhoid I had affected my metabolism for ever. The scar I have on my brow I carry for life. The trauma I faced from bullies to non Marathi speaking people lingers. The most effective teachers I have had has been Mrs Ramaswamy who taught us history and English during 7th and 8th grade and my grandfather who was somewhat of a role model for me for a long period during these formative years.

My grandparents were very closely involved in nurturing us during a phase when my working parents would not have time to watch us due to work commitments and daycare was not existent. These ontogenic experiences are recapitulated again and again and form the human experience. Hence.. proven.

The later part of the week I found my joy in biking. I was initially sceptical given the traffic and bad rides but the early morning predawn time period turned out to be perfect for pedaling through the streets of Pune. You cover more distance and see more sights than when you walk and even though the potholes and uneven surfacing make riding hell, with the lack of the smell of diesel exhaust and anyone jostling for space, I often ended rides feeling rejuvenated .

Time was fleeting. I could not accomplish many things I had marked as to dos for this trip. I don’t feel stressed about it though. I tried to make this trip about quality time with my parents. We often claim our memories for ourselves.We keep a bit of what events happen around us in our own personal reference framework of things for easy retrieval. Others have their own. They may not be the same.

326 Rastapeth today and our home on the 2nd floor and ghasargundi

Life as we remember is not a linear series of events but multiple snapshots. Events that define or linger in memory or are available for easy retrieval. Other events they pass. As we remember or narrate our history, the countless moments that are non descript or spent listlessly will not occur. My parents introduced me to a neighbor who many years ago had asked a favor and I had spent a few distracted moments helping him out. This was not etched in my memory for even forced recall. He remembered it vividly and so did my parents. Moments of joy, sadness, misery, great love, separation, grief linger. Images of events linger. I remember my grandmother’s passing as her lying on the ground dressed in my cousin’s dress because there were no other clothes readily available. I remember 326 Rasta peth as many images of us playing cricket on the terrace, biking on the linear connected balcony, sliding down the brick red bannisters, ducking to escape a kamikaze pigeon while entering the toilets, watching Wimbledon or a Sunday movie in the ‘2nd room’ , playing underarm cricket and table tennis on the small blue table with Ramu in the ‘1st room’ , the big pile of gray gravel next to the Sivan kovil and the joys of running up and down the mound, the red mud of the taalim with the big thick rope swing that swung from wall to wall and the fear I felt approaching the premises where the almost naked wrestlers dressed in langots idled on the benches twirling moustache and clubs admiring themselves; watching life go by from the balcony in the evenings, however silly it sounds in retrospect now- the cows gathered in a circle ruminating, the sardarji with his ice cream cart offering Rs 2 pista ice cream cones, dandia during navaratri, your cousins making their way over from grandparents place 2 blocks away, early morning Bhajana mandali singing and chanting and playing jalra and peti making rounds from temple to temple, the Panse having his tea, looking at you and looking away, on his balcony in Panse wada, your friend Parag whistling out to you to ask if you want to join him for some completely pointless activity. ….So many more memories. So many more images.

What images and memories my parents have of what our childhood was? I wish I could tap in. My dad calls them happy days and wishes we could go back to then. The fact is we won’t , but I need to give back some of togetherness we all felt growing up. These visits are just an attempt to