Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Just Yellow

A BRIEF TRAVEL DIARY of a trip in September 2005

I discovered sunflower on my trip to Urukunda. The sporadic sunflower plant-farms between Adoni to Urukunda made me happy. The yellow uniform that the flowers wore appealed to the eye and the mind. Farms perched at the bottom of the seemingly artificially-installed hillocks and mountains, rows of yellow on either side of the road and the railway track were a pleasing sight.

My mother accompanied me on the piligrimage. We started on a Saturday morning, reached Urukunda at about 8 in the night only to find that no cooked food was being sold because cholera has recently broken out in the locality. A couple of bananas, a few mouthfuls of ‘borugulu’ (a form of crispy rice) with ‘mixture’ (a kind of namkeen) kept our tummies content. Early next morning, we finished darshan and started back. Single road, tiny villages with an estimated (by me) population of about 200 to 300 each, thin and dark human figures, not-so-casual looks at the passing bus, the conspicuousness of places of worship of all religions, the lack of hygiene and a lack of a forced veil of decency were very much evident.

I saw temples, mosques, churches, electricity poles, narrow canals running in front of the houses, bare-bodied children, dilapidated schools, bus-shelters inhabited by people and cattle alike, distance signboards, small groups of people standing on roads idly, maybe in hope of a day’s work and the day’s bread. At one point in time, I remembered the movie ‘Swades’ where SRK goes around in the boat with all the village folk around him.

I was eager to get home and by 5 that day, we were back only to see that the rain had started once we were under the home-sweet-home roof.