Thought Overflow

XLRI conducts two excursions for the first year students. One of them is an Adventure Trip, which basically consists of outdoor activities generally conducted by the Tata Steel Adventure Foundation (TSAF). This generally consists of outdoor activities which are aimed at promoting team-building and bonding between the students. The other is the Village Exposure Programme (aka Village Trip). In order to facilitate the process, XLRI divides the students into small batches of between six to ten, and ties up with various NGOs which then take responsibility for the students and take charge of the proceedings. ). This weekend, I had my Village Trip. We had the smallest possible group of only six people, and we were under the charge of the Tata Steel Rural Development Society (TSRDS), who would be taking us to a village called Jamadoba, near Dhanbad (if these places don’t make sense to you, ignore the names ).

We were scheduled to start at 8:30 AM on Friday, 17th July. The transportation provided to the students is generally a four-wheel drive vehicle like a Tata Sumo. However, we got a little lucky, and we got a pretty good Mahindra Scorpio. However, with the driver included, there were seven of us along with plenty of luggage. Oh well, we knew that we were not to expect luxuries, and we knew that we were expected to adjust and make the best of whatever we got. So, that’s precisely what we did. Being the awesome dude that I am, I volunteered to take the first shift of sitting at the back with the luggage, while four people sat on the backseat and one lucky chap sat up front. I suppose the lucky chap had the most comfortable seat, but all of us got a chance to be lucky over the course of the journey, so no ill-feelings.

We were among the first groups to depart from college, probably due to the fact that we only had six people in our group. It was a great morning. There was very little sun, a lot of really cool wind. The view of the scenery from the window was breath-taking. We stopped on the way at a Sai Baba Temple as well.

At this point, I should mention—yes, photos have been taken. I’ll be uploading them somewhere and putting up the link here or passing the link to you over IM. For now, be content with reading the blog . At this point, I need to explain a little geography. Jamshedpur (the city in which XLRI is located) is in the state of Jharkhand. Jamadoba, the village we were headed to, is also in Jharkhand. However, to get from Jamshedpur to Jamadoba in as little time as possible, we need to briefly pass through West Bengal, one of the neighbouring states of Jharkhand. Unfortunately, we were unaware that the Indian National Congress, one of the major political parties of the state, had called for a state-wide bandh, resulting in the highways being barricaded. We managed to pass a couple of small obstacles by pretending to be members of the press (in fact, the number plate of our Scorpio had the logo of Hindustan Times). However, when we got to a town called Purulia, we were stopped, and not allowed to proceed. There were seven of us in the car, and at least twenty-five to thirty people outside, blocking our path, staring at us, peering inside to see what we were carrying in the car…not fun, not fun at all.

The irony was when, after several minutes of fruitless negotiations, we decided to turn around and go by another, longer, route…yeah, right! As if it was going to be that easy! The moment we turned on the engine and tried to reverse it, several people surrounded us to prevent us from turning around. Why? Because strikes in Bengal generally last for twelve hours (theoretically), i.e. from 6 AM to 6 PM, and these ‘gentlemen’ decided that we would be honoured with compulsory attendance of the bandh…’til 6 freakin’ o’ clock! Fortunately, however, after about an hour or so of this mess, one of the main leaders went away for lunch, leaving the others slightly confused. Taking advantage of the lack of clear communication between them, we turned and quickly left the town. Even on the way back, we were stopped at two more blockades, but the driver handled them deftly—once again, by playing the press card.

Once we were out of the ‘danger zone’, we stopped for tea, got fresh directions, made a new plan, and backtracked to at least 50% of what we had already travelled. Then, we set off on again by another route. Nothing eventful occurred on this road, except that we stopped for lunch (well, yeah, we’re humans…we had to eat). We reached Bokaro first, where there’s a famous Steel Plant. We didn’t have time to visit the steel plant, but we did shop a little, for some chocolates and biscuits to hand out to the villagers and their children the next day. From there, we drove on to Dhanbad, which was the official checkpoint of the day. We arrived at about 8:15 PM and checked into a pretty good hotel. We had dinner at a fast-food multi-cuisine restaurant that managed to serve edible Chinese food and some Pav-Bhaji as well. Afterwards, we returned to the hotel and went to sleep in our air-conditioned rooms. We were scheduled to depart from the hotel at 8:30 AM the next morning.

In part 2: The ‘village’, painting competition and coal mining.