Day 1 - December 24th 2012

My JY confirmation mail came in December first week, just after my college vacations had begun. Even then I was not completely sure of what the so-called ‘Yatra’ could make possible for me. So I just decided to ‘jump’ into the opportunity.

I de-boarded my flight on Monday morning as I land in Mumbai for the first time. As instructed, I took a cab to Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Coming from a foggy Delhi to a heated up Mumbai was quite a jhakta.

As I enter the venue, a horde of new faces were all around me – 450 young people from all over India – from villages and cities, ranging from farmers to professionals working with reputed Investment Banks, different cultures, different languages, but one thing was evidently common – the passion to learn, the urge to bring about change, the potential to be the foundation stones of a new India. I had to get registered after the luggage was tagged, and then we were asked to find our Group members. These ‘Groups’ of ‘strangers’ were Yatris strategically selected and placed together in Cohorts with Facilitators as coordinators and a collection of Cohort became the group. I got ‘Group I’ and very soon I was in a crowd of new faces – each one as excited and pumped up as me.

Each group is a combination of 3 cohorts (2 Boys and 1 Girls). Each cohort is composed of 7 people – 6 Yatris and 1 Facilitator. There are total 21 groups.

While people were still registering, we combined 2 groups and started introducing ourselves with just a single thing we want us to be remembered as. This was much fun, and we managed to mint out wacky nick-names for almost all of us. I soon realized that these 450 people are not ordinary young men and women. Each one has his own story to share, and a dream to chase. The diversity prevails in their stories too. With some of them you could relate very strongly, but others would seem too hard to digest.

The very much awaited lunch followed. And I must admit that the management by JY team was awesome right from Day 1, and the lunch went smooth with people still introducing themselves while having a bite of the delicious food.

We were then asked to get seated in the Convention Center, where the Induction Ceremony would take place, followed by Team Introductions, General Guideline discussion, Cultural programs, and the Special take of the day – Mumbai Dabbawalas.

At this point, I must bring an important point up. From about 19000 registrations, 450 top selected candidates got to pursue JY 2012. The selections were not random, but based on a careful selection pattern, gauging NOT ONLY entrepreneurial spirit, but also the passion to bring about a change. So it was NOT individual play, but a team effort. And that was one of the key issues brought about in the discussion – India has sufficient funds and resources, and there is no dearth of ideas for sure. So what we miss is team to work with. And thanks to the Yatra, our teamwork began from Day 1. And this was highlighted very successfully by the Dabbawalas!

The initial Induction sessions were formal introduction to the program, and hence, very detailed (and too boring too). The JY volunteers and Core Team looked as energetic as ever and I partially envied their vigor, which was very evidently missing from the crowd, where every second person seemed to doze off. Stories were shared by the Organizing team members, and ‘Thank you’s were given, after which the Orientation finally got over.

The next session was a BIG surprise. The crowd was awakened by dancing onto the Gangnam style! – A warm-up exercise as mentioned by them. ‘Yaaro Chalo’ was played for the first time next, and we tried to match our steps with those of the Choreographer. Each little step symbolized our vision – beautifully portrayed in moving art. Next, some volunteers talked about their own experience in a beautiful musical setting.

With this we were told that a session with the first Role model would follow now – none other than the Dabbawalas!

Diary of the Curious Idiot

Jagriti Yatra 2012

Tied you to my Heart

I've tied you to my heart
Never shall we break apart

A glance, serene pure magic
Melting into your reflection
A colorful ornament, that sparkle in your eyes
Essence taming this devil inside
Beautiful curses behind silent cries

I've tied you to my heart
Never shall we break apart

Your shadow etches itself behind forgotten steps
Immortal imprints inside my heart
Every since I looked up at you
This glance has never been lowered since
Ghosts of dreams and hopes anew

I've tied you to my heart
Never shall we break apart

The birds will sleep, the sun shall set
The leaves could shy away today
In an hour when everyone has slept
With this longing disease of desire
A wink of sleep could never have crept

I've tied you to my heart
Never shall we break apart

The bite shall not go in
Nor the throat be wet this day
For inside are memories, full and incomplete
Another day to live, one more for you
A day to come, red below beautiful feet

I've tied you to my heart
Never shall we break apart

- K

Anastasia

AS delicate as a petal, as innocent as the mountain snow, Anastasia was perfect personification of the compassionate love for being alive. You could keep looking at the fullness of her eyes and let the depth in them capture you inside out. The beauty of her innocent soul would manifest itself in the light that flows from her eyes. Her smile – like beautiful scenery on the canvas of her aura, paints itself on you making the complement universe unworthy of any notice. Her long black hair, kissed by the ecstasy of silent breeze, rubs slowly past her face, as if being jealous of revealing any more of the divinity in her beauty. And while you’re still looking at her, your eyes meet, and that single glance makes impossible vivid romantic fantasies come alive in your heart.

She could be a little cute baby one moment – bubbly with richness of life and emotion, and a symbol of humble aged wisdom the next. You would be carrying that silly smile thinking about such sweetness being existent, when suddenly the warmth of her thoughts would consume your existence in totality. She was as real as one’s belief in oneself. Possible, it might be, for the existence of your existence to confuse you someday, but her essence inside you would stay forever. The same essence which gives you heavenly pleasures to make her happy, but then the pain it instills when you miss her, never goes away.

You could give up everything just to be with her, holding her hand, playing with her hair, feeling her breath, and the warmth in it. You want that softness of hers to be yours now, and yours forever – to never let her go once she is so close that you breathe in her presence and she breathes yours. Her aroma would intoxicate you with powerfully deep emotions and an urge, uncontrollable, to hold her within you and make all boundaries cease to exist for now and forever.

All one would know in one's heart was that blatant truth - With her love, you were not two with her, but one.

K

27th November 2012

KLARKE opens his eyes, and a sudden gush of blood explodes through his veins making him suddenly feel the cold metal around his arms. As his pupils dilate, everything seems so white and pure. The serenity instills a hybrid emotion of beauty and enigma. He feels something beneath his nose - his breath – being alive! As he takes in the alien cold air into his system, a sudden curiosity shakes his inner foundations vehemently.

"Where am I?"

He wants to feel his arms and legs, but the force pulling him down is too strong. He blinks his eyes furiously to gain vision - desperate to push away the ghost of ambiguity clouding his consciousness with patches of fear and impatience. A 'tick tock' sound synchronous with his heartbeat catches his attention, and he looks up to see a blurry huge ball of light suspended over his head, with a bottle of medicine suspended up on his right, and a meter beeping some vital stats in electronic signals. His mind works out the equation, and he has no idea how he ended up being there - in a hospital.

He wants to feel his feet, his legs - to stand up and walk and explore this place of which he has no evidence in memory. But his body fails him badly, and he still feels heavily bolted down to the bed.

He looks towards the side, shuts his eyes hard, and opens them again to look at a beautiful slim face enveloped in fair slim hands, with long hair covering portions of her face seemingly possessive of that beauty. Christine sleeps like a little fairy on the chair beside the hospital bed, her face resting beside Klarke's left arm, as she seems to embrace his left hand and sleeps with her mouth slightly open like a little girl. Klarke smiles, though even smiling takes up a lot of effort. He moves his fingers and suddenly feels her soft lips. He forgets why he is there, and just keeps looking at her. Exhausted with ecstasy, he feels the pillow behind his head and closes his eyes, unable to take that ecstatic strain any more.

His hand leaves contact and he looks up to see Anastasia, who seems to have a complicated emotion spread across her face. Her eyes gleam with tears of happiness, but her forehead shows signs of pain and grief. But Klarke doesn’t want to think about this, and he smiles at his cute little angel, and remembers how she still takes care of him like good old college days. But he’s so angry at Christine for suddenly going somewhere and leaving him alone. He tries to gather energy to ask, but neither his body nor mind seems to have the strength to do that.

Anastasia embraces Klarke’s hands and goes out to call the nurse. The nurse enters and starts preparing an injection. Anastasia whispers close to his face – “Everything will be alright, Babe” and with a beautiful smile spread across her face still so full of worry, she silently leaves when the nurse indicates her that the patient needs complete rest.

It’s a warm sultry evening when Klarke wakes up to find the doctor standing beside him examining his Medical Record file while noting down readings from the beeping instruments. He has been unconscious for two days after the injection, the doctor says. Klarke can feel his strength come back to him in bits. Anastasia sits beside him, looking extremely exhausted. But even with that she manages to carry on her serenity and gives a strange comfort to Klarke. But the coldness of her face brings out a lot of unpleasant questions in his mind.

The doctor suddenly speaks up. He asks Klarke if he remembers anything before the ‘accident’. 

“Accident?”

He lays there in shock, in misery and pain. As his consciousness is less cloudy now – he uses logic, he shakes in agony, looks towards Anastasia and whispers -

“Christine?”

Anastasia is choked with tears and grief. She turns towards the doctor, who silently looks down and says –

“I’m Sorry.”

14th October 2012

KLARKE lie on his bed, looking outside at the beautiful painting-like scenery, embraced by the golden rays of the morning Sun.

It was truly miraculous, he thought, to find time to just lie there, without moving much. Feeling his warm breath while acknowledging the soft sunny embrace - much in contrast to the cold winds that struggled victoriously to enter the room aiming to challenge any entropy resistance. Everything else seemed to be a part of one game or another. Everyone was a player participating in a rat race – the result of which was silly moments of superficial satisfaction, too temporary to last even a microsecond on the Universal clock. But then, so was life, he accepted with a grin.
His last week at the University had been a strong evidence. It was strange, yet pretty self-explanatory, to see how people would sing songs of selflessness, while striving to push all others back when it came to their own race. This was a pseudo setup being worshiped since ages not recorded by human history, but which continued to infect the basic driving gears of our subconscious existence inside mortal structures of flesh and blood.
A hand gently moved over him, like being humbly jealous of the thoughts that occupied his mind. He glanced towards the delicate fingers – which seemed to draw random shapes on his bare chest. He remembered this illogical addiction of his - with how childishly possessive Christine would suddenly be for him at times. Earlier anomalies faded into nothingness, and he was wearing a smile gifted by the thoughts of the delicate figure lying on his side.
Mimicking legs using two of his fingers, he started a walk from her finger-tips, passing by her shoulders and neck, finally stopping on her lips, where his fingers skated over the crimson reddish shade. Christine, still in sweet slumber, squeezed into his curvature like a little child, her head resting on his chest. He could smell the scent of her soft hair, as they brushed past his face. He held her close, while the warmth from her breath on his chest increased their intimacy even more. He locked his fingers in hers, and kissed softly on her neck. She chuckled from the tickling, still half-asleep. She was like a snow-white charcoal sketch of his – just a lot more real. With his thumb, he traced the corners of her lips, like trying to smoothen the redness which seemed to increase more and more as she blushed. As he kissed on her forehead, she opened her eyes and closed them again, shrugging softly against the warmth of his body heat, intoxicated with pleasure. She looked at him – at the roughness of his young face, at those eyes which seemed to always say so much, feeling his strong arms hold her tight around her waist. She put her arms around his shoulders and bringing her face closer, gently stroke her nose against his. He gave a soft bite on the top of her nose, after which she giggled and hugged him tight. They stayed like that for a very long time.

K

6th October 2012

LAST night, Klarke sat looking up at the dull reddish moon, fresh after the full moon a couple of days back. A thought suspended in his conscience, like a copy of him, kept on talking without a pause. As he saw the gradient at the corners of the moon – sudden but smooth - reddish white light dimming into darkness of the night, he felt a deep connection with this gradient. Men were, he thought, like this gradient, sailing in the dark sky of our life.

We take birth as a bright white moon, glowing with a heavenly smile. Time passes on, and we rise – moving up the ladder. The glimmer seems to dull gradually, and spots of impact appear on our contour as we experience 'life' as it is. But the fight remains, and the light struggles to keep the darkness away. Teenage, adulthood, old age – they come and go gradually - a sharp contrast to the actual speed of our life where each moment seems so important, that we forget that all it is, is to rise one day, and set another.

And then this man reaches his peak. He stands conquering the darkness below him. His elegance is unmatched and unquestionable. But then he looks at himself – at his own dark spots. He wants to hide them, forget about them. But his life is an open book, inaugurated by none other than he himself, a book he would hate to read. 'Hate' was somehow inadequate – hate and dread, maybe.

But time is merciful, and all this passes away, like an obvious joke on all what was felt. The progress now, is towards the end. The man knows his inescapable destiny. Some wish to face it with a smile, others accept comfort in shooing the thought away.

Time would, meanwhile, sit on its couch, eating pop-corns, watching the second half of the movie – aware that soon it will have to get up and switch his movie off. It watches man, with his billion emotions, each given worth too exaggerated.

Klarke stopped the thought for a second, looked up again, and smiled. This was our success, he thought, the most successful failure. To be embedded immortal in stone, or to die in a gutter, seemed synonymous to him now. But his reflection was not to conclude here. Suddenly, he spotted a shooting star. The star seemed to smile at him, a humble calming smile. And Klarke was overtaken by a gust of joy – that there was, indeed, one exception!

The exception was love. An abstraction, and a reality. Suddenly, his conscience was filled with a billion thoughts – yet he felt he knew nothing about it – that there was so much more to learn – so much more to experience. The love when a mother watches her new born child. The love when a father ties your shoe laces on your first day of school. The love when a child sees his first toy. The love when a child watches his elder brother fight for him. The love in the eyes of the grandparents, as you touch their feet.

There was so much love around him, he felt delighted. Love, as he deeply felt, had the divine power to warp time. A long walk with a loved one passed away in a matter of microseconds, while a hug seemed to last a lifetime. He realized he had found a small scratch on the smiling ego of time, and this thought was highly elating.

He looked at his hands, felt love in abstraction, when for instance, he touched the dew on a morning rose, washed his bike, plowed the garden when he was a kid, made his first sketch, stood looking at the sunrise on the Ganges, took a deep breath of fresh morning air, and...embraced Christine's hands.

The thought brought back the pain lying dormant somewhere in his heart. He tried to recall if ever he was in love with a girl. He was together with a girl a year back, but that was more of a 'growing up' than love – at the same time, his recognition of the impurity that humans are prone to induce in the purest of gifts given by God. She was a passing phase, long gone, without leaving its mark on the sands of time, forgotten as quickly as the thought had come.

But Christine was an impossibility he would be in love with forever. Each time the name came in his mind, the brightness in her eyes filled his dark sky. She was like a shooting star – and he was the moon. For a couple of moments, she would come and his night sky would glisten with brilliance. He would lock his fingers among hers and get flooded with a divine warmth – a bidirectional connection of two souls. It was worth living life this way – howsoever temporary it might be. Klarke wondered - how easily this four letter word – love - stood powerfully facing two more four letter words – time and life. How easily the thought of Christine changed his conclusion that life was going to be a tragedy no one could avoid.

He wondered what Christine might be thinking at that moment. If she could feel his heartbeat increase more and more every time he thought about her. If she knew that Klarke could feel her scent enter his system and intoxicate him with her beauty.

Something inside him said - “Yes she does” and he wanted to think no further, say no further.

K