Daily Roti Guaranteed

Traveling in Rajasthan and looking at the sights, at the good roads, all the mobile phone shops and the unending mineral water stalls, it is difficult to believe that there is very much poverty in the state.

One afternoon, we were wandering around the small town of Kolayat with its lotus-filled lake ringed by temples in the scorching sun, when I saw a big yellow sign painted on a wall.

The sign on the wall was actually an advertisement for the government’s Rural Employment Guaranteed Act - NREGA. (Note: I have since heard a lot of drawbacks about the scheme, but this post is not about that.) For anyone who's willing to do physical work, the scheme guarantees a daily wage.

The yellow sign listed out in tables, the quanta of physical work that had to be performed each day, and the pay for that amount of work.

People were required to dig the earth and create ditches. Per day, each person was required to dig a ditch 10 ft by 5 ft by 1 ft deep. For this work, they would be paid a total of 100 Rs. ($2). 30% would be deducted as tax at the source. So each person ended up earning Rs 70 for the whole day.

Women laborers were expected to do the same amount of work and they were paid the same as men. When it came to hard physical labor, there was no gender discrimination.

For us, just staying in comfortable hotels and eating three meals a day with a little bit of sightseeing itself seemed very tiring. During the day, the dry desert heat was enervating. I couldn’t even imagine the hardship of digging a ditch in this heat. And for removing 50 cubic feet of hard packed earth, they got 100 Rupees. This translates to a rate of 2 Rupees (4 cents) for each cubic foot that they cleared.

And I had been naively wondering if poverty was still around in Rajasthan.

The Desert Train

In Rajasthan, we discovered that one very good way to view the desert was to take the morning train from Bikaner to Jaisalmer. From the comfort of our compartment seats, we were able to watch the train cut through the Thar desert. This is a relatively new line and was completed only a couple of years ago.

The train travels right along the desert shrubs and the sand. If you stare out long enough, you’ll see all the animals that you are likely to encounter in the desert – camels, dikdiks and all types of cattle.

There was just one drawback though. The blowing sand. No matter how much we tried, we couldn’t avoid the fine sand dust that got into our bags and clothes.

The Jaisalmer Express (Train 4704) at 7am from the Lalgarh station, which is a sister station to Bikaner. Perhaps due to a small bug in the railway reservations system, this train doesn’t show up when you search for trains departing Bikaner. You have to know enough to put in Lalgarh as the originating station, and I doubt that many try that.

Consequently, our train was practically empty. We had pretty much the whole compartment to ourselves, which is quite a luxury in a crowded country like India.

Many paths to the same goal

There is a lot of talk of New Year’s resolutions lately and on how to make them effective. Reading them reminded me of the following incident.

I was waiting in line for a movie screening at the Max Mueller bhawan in the Kala Goda area in downtown Mumbai. The man standing in front of me was telling his friend the story of how he gave up smoking, and since I was standing right next to them I heard it too.

Apparently the man was a heavy smoker. He used to smoke around 20 cigarettes a day, buying them one at a time from the small kiosk right in front of his office. This was many years ago, when each cigarette cost one rupee.

One day, he went to the kiosk and the boy said the cost was Rs. 1.25 per cigarette.
“Abhey, I have been buying for years from this shop. Even yesterday I paid just one rupee. So give it to me for one rupee,” the man said.
But the boy at the kiosk wouldn’t budge and wanted Rs. 1.25. The man refused to pay that, and right there he stopped and had never smoked a single cigarette after that.

A Send Off in Bikaner

One night in Bikaner I noticed a procession. It was past 9 pm and we were traveling in an autorickshaw. At the head of the procession was one man in his sixties wearing a suit and a garland of marigold. Behind him were around 30-40 men and boys of all ages. A few feet behind the men walked the ladies. One lady in the lead was also wearing a garland of flowers. About two dozen other women and girls were walking along with her. It was a relatively quiet procession with no accompanying music.

“Where are these people going?” I asked our auto-driver.
“Haj, sir. That man and his wife are going to this year's Haj. The people of their community are going up to the railway station to send them off.”

The couple would go to Delhi by the night train, and then fly to Saudi from there. I was impressed that on a workday evening so many people had felt it important enough to walk along to the railway station because two of their community elders were off to Haj.

In a world where a lot of the romance has been squeezed out from travel, it was refreshing to see some people still celebrating a journey with such pride.

A Favorite Shirt

If you are the kind of person that gets attached to some of the small things you own (certain clothes or a particular pen, for example) you will understand this.

My wife pointed out that a few stitches were coming undone in my green striped Polo shirt, noticeable if one looked closely. Among my shirts, it was the one I liked the most. It had become a favorite and I took it with me on each and every trip. I knew what I had to do.

On the last day of this year’s Pushkar camel fair, I put the shirt in my daypack. In front of the Bramha temple, there were a number of people seeking alms. I hesitatingly took the shirt out the bag, because what they really wanted was money. But the elderly lady who took the shirt from me surprised me with her eagerness

Hopefully, the shirt will have a long second life.

Fauna in the Rajasthan desert

Being a city-raised guy, I only had stereotypical ideas of what animals there would be in the Rajasthan desert. Turned out that I was wrong about almost everything I had imagined.

First of all, there are no free ranging camels in the desert. They all seem to be spoken for and are now domesticated.

I also had no idea that there would be such an abundance of cattle (cows, buffalo, goats) everywhere we went. On a very tall sand dune, I once saw a cow seated perfectly still, looking down at us. It was surreal and looked like a PhotoShop image.

All over the desert, there are small deer that run fast. They looked like dik-dik. And I was surprised by the number of blue peacocks that were wandering about, mostly near where the humans live.

A town called Kheecan (near Falodi) has become a sanctuary for demoiselle cranes – birds that migrate down from Siberia and Central Asia to spend the winter months in Rajasthan.

Western Rajasthan Itinerary

Here’s our itinerary for the 3 weeks we spent in Western Rajasthan:

Mumbai – Mt Abu (the marble temples of Dilwara) – Ajmer – Pushkar Camel Fair (& Literary Fest) – Bikaner – Kolayat (Day trip from Bikaner) – Jaisalmer (+ 2 Day Desert safari) – Kheecan (Demoiselle cranes) – Jodhpur – Mumbai

If you have any travel questions about any of these places, just leave me a note.