Blog 56 Julwania to Indore

14th November

Today started slightly differently. I get up but I have packed the night before. I dress. Brush teeth. Exit the room, slide the bike down a flight of stairs and whilst it gets light drink chai.

Reflecting on the true hero of this story are the people who get up every day to go to work. Every day of their working lives they climb out of a warm bed, or maybe just barely warm from a thin blanket to commute with millions of others on cold communial transport to a place of work they hate bullied all day by a person who is overwhelmingly disliked. Springing into your chosen vocation with excitement is not the commonest characteristics of the working population. Chai finished I leave.

Downstairs this hotel has a 24 hour open chai stall alongside steel counters selling sweets, doughnuts, potato samosas and fried flat things. Families in cars step out of their cars wrapped in blankets. Trucks fly past in bow waves of ululating sirens and engine drivers berserk with fatigue having driven through the night.

Later I drink more chai. That's all I do along with ride a bicycle and look around.

109kms to go

Story of the False Baba

“He is a false baba,” said the chap next to me, also drinking chai. “If he was a true baba he would be in the mountains meditating and not be with people begging for money.” He paused. “You see sir, people have their problems and if you are not literate you cannot identity the solutions so they turn to false babas who do not want to work.”

A Bit of Information

noun,pluralba·bas[bah-buhz; French ba-ba].

1. a spongelike cake leavened with yeast and often containing raisins, baked in a small mold and then usually soaked with a rum syrup.

2. Baba ("father, grandfather, wise old man, sir")is an honorific term, of Persian origin, used in several West Asian and South Asian cultures. It is used as a mark of respect to refer to Hindu ascetics (sannyasis) and Sikh gurus, as a suffix or prefix to their names, e.g. Sai Baba of Shirdi, Baba Ramdevji,

I found a section of the old highway 52. There was something soft about the old way, a gentler India.

“An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”

Mahatma Gandhi.

The Old Highway 52

It was a passive sort of day. In between the rumble of truck tyres and engines and horns sounded as if going to battle there were quiet moments when I heard parrots (sound) in short bushy trees. Up the road there lay an oddity in the form of a small two people seater ‘Wild Bean Cafe’. So against the sound of the machine beeping like a cardiac monitor for 15 minutes fell into a deep sleep. Then I carried on. Again into the Ghats, slipping between trucks with my electric bicycle up the hills I overtake them….yes, I am delirious with my power!

Map of the Day