Hello from a 9400 km train!

It’s been 13 days, and Tata Jagriti Yatra is only getting better by the day, or more euphemistically, by the hour. 🙂 But no, it wasn’t all hunky dory. And, the yatra is not exactly a joyride. 350 of us wake up each day to the myriad challenges of yatra, with a mind-boggling challenge cropping up each day to greet us. Time, (and poor internet connectivity) prevents me from blogging elaborately about all thirteen days, as I’d promised in the previous post. Allow me to provide you with a glimpse of what actually transpires each day.

• The train – it’s something in itself. Adapting a train as a residence for 400-odd young people is one daunting exercise in logistics, if you didn’t know. There are separate male and female compartments with two AC chair cars for conference sessions. There are even separate bathrooms (bogies have been converted to bathrooms through some very innovative methods which are beyond the purview of this blog post 😀 ).
• We’ve the most unique morning alarm system to wake us all up each day. It’s the ‘Tata jagriti geet’ – an endearing song penned by Prasoon Joshi, which doubles up as the anthem of the yatra. The song is played as loudly as possible in the makeshift speakers, and we reluctantly open up, sleep still lingering in our eyes from the late night discussions (ahem!).
• Each day is about visits and/or interactions. We’ve already covered some 4000 kilometers into the country, and the journey is hardly half way through. We’d go visiting ‘role models’ (people/enterprises) who’re entrepreneurs themselves and have made a difference among the people around them, uplifting and empowering them.
• Too much baggage, too little space, and you’re bound to lose something. Being a habitually-careless person, it was a daily affair for me. Losing stuff that is. Something or other belonging to me would go missing each day. It was unnerving, so to speak. When you badly need an item, you wouldn’t be able to place it. Else, it’d be lying around exactly in front of your eyes.
• For a long long time, I was living with the misconception that I was good at networking. A couple of days into the yatra and I realized how wrong I actually was.  Day 13, and I still have more than half the yatris to acquaint with!
• Self realization was the biggest merit of this yatra. This realization was a blitzkrieg of sorts, it stung into my psyche, and made a striking impact in my mind and soul, the level of impact increasing progressively by the day. Today I stand transformed, a new soul, a recharged mind.

That will do for today. 🙂