Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the yatra. When I said I had read about it in a newspaper, online, they wanted to know
which newspaper. I had no idea.
“Was it the Times of India ?” asked one man.
I did know of the Times of India —and knew it was in English. “It could have been,” I
said.
Times of India !” he cried to the assembled crowd.
Soon a cellphone was thrust into my hand. When, moments later, it was snatched away,
I had been interviewed by a newspaper in Agra. I know this because Mansi later read me
an extensive quote—attributed to me, but none of which I actually said—from a Hindi-lan-
guage Agra daily.
The man who had asked me about the Times was called Jai. In Shri Baba's absence, he
was lead sadhu on the march. Shri Baba never leaves the land of Krishna, and so would
join the yatra only when it reached Braj. The sadhus were carrying a pair of his shoes on
the march, though, so he could be there in spirit.
Jai had been following Shri Baba for ten years now. A former social worker, he lived at
Maan Mandir and was an almost frantically amiable man. In Hindi, he apologized for not
speaking English. In English, I apologized for not speaking Hindi. Not to be outdone, he
made an elaborate pantomime of seizing the air in front of my mouth, inserting it into his
ear, and then raising his hands once more in apology.
No, I said. It is I who must apologize.
Conditions on the yatra were spartan but well managed. The tents were large, sturdy
structures of green canvas, perhaps handed down by the British upon their departure in
1948. Each tent was strung with a single, blinding lightbulb hanging from an old wire con-
necting it to the generator. There was a steel water tank on a trailer, and a truck mounted
with an oven for baking flatbread, and a crew of at least half a dozen guys whose job it was
to drive ahead of the march, set up camp, and cook. All we had to do was walk.
There is a long tradition of political walking in India, and this particular yatra happened
to coincide with the anniversary of Ghandi's famous Salt March, the yatra of yatras. For
more than three weeks in the spring of 1930, Gandhi and an ever-increasing army of fol-
lowers marched toward the sea, where they would make salt from seawater, symbolically
violating the Salt Act imposed by Britain fifty years earlier. Along the way, Gandhi made
evening speeches to the marchers and to the thousands of local people who came to invest-
igate.
Covered widely in the international media, the Salt March gave a huge symbolic boost
to the Indian independence movement, and put civil disobedience on the map as a major
political strategy. The marches of the American civil rights movement were yatras. And it
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