Public Transport In USA

Well, another weekend in cold Michigan and another blog. I was going to write another one on a book that I finished recently, but then my brother who is a student in the United States and follows my blog suggested that I write about the public transport system in the States.

It so happens that weekends tend to be boring, especially if you are alone and so my relatives here in the States suggest I visit them, which is a perfectly valid expectation, more so because, I come here at most once a year (at least have done so till now, barring the last year) and that too not for a very long duration. So I repeat its a very valid expectation. Now, by quirk of fate, I always seem to join companies that dont ever have offices in large cities. So Rheine, Greenville and now Kalamazoo are all relatively non-descript places that my companies required me to visit and stay for a significant duration of time (significant is anything greater than 1 month). Believe me there is nothing wrong with the places, for barring Rheine, Greenville and Kalamazoo are not that small, but all of them are more than an hours drive from the nearest significant big city, so to go anywhere, one has to first go to the nearest significant place. So for Rheine, it was Cologne or Muenster, for Greenville it was Atlanta and for Kalamazoo, I am learning it is Detroit.

Anyways, thats not the point of this blog. I was hoping to travel to Pittsburgh to my cousins place, which is like a good 5-6 hours drive from Kalamazoo and I was just exploring my options short of renting a car, since I am a little bit flustered about driving in the snow. So I was checking the flights and to go to Pittsburgh from Kalamazoo, one needs to first go to Detroit. So if one has grown up in India, one says "Ok, so can I take a bus to Detroit (something like Pune-Bombay)?" So you look around and find that the bus takes over 6 hours for a journey that would take normally less than 2 hours by car. Then you ask, can I take a train, well yes you can, but that is like a 3 hour journey, but there are only like 3 trains in a day, and you are like whoa, there is a bus every 10 minutes between Pune and Bombay, innumerable trains all day etc. Anyways, so you can't take the bus, you might take the train, but you will need a lot of planning and the train station and the Airport are not close, so then whats the best solution? You ask your American colleagues, what they would do and they say, " Well, I would rent a car and drive to Detroit and then fly". Then I ask them if I have to rent a car to drive to Detroit, I might as well rent a car and drive to Pittsburgh, the whole idea was to make the journey without renting a car. In short, to do something significant in this country, one just has to have a car (rented or bought).

Having gone thru' this, I start fondly remembering my Europe days. Remember, that I was staying in Rheine, which is pretty much in the middle of nowhere. I mean the place is charming in its own little way (maybe I am nostalgic), but yeah, the beauty of the place was that it was small and it still had everything one wished for in a radius of 5km. You could wake up one fine morning and decide I want to go to Bremen for a lark. Just walk to Rheine station, tell the guy at the counter in your broken German , you wanted to do so and he would come up with a print-out with multiple options to get there, some taking longer times than the others, but then there were always options. You simply bought a ticket, which on weekends was valid for 5 people on any slow train in Germany till 3:00 am the next morning. If you just followed the options given to you,  there was almost 100% guarantee that you would actually get to Bremen at the time mentioned in the print-out. I often wondered, how they scheduled their trains with such precision and was amazed at the reach of the network. Sitting in Germany, I could go by train to quite a few EU countries, be it Austria, Netherlands, Italy, France or Switzerland and could buy a ticket sitting in Germany. It was just amazing and the system worked with clock-work precision. Sometimes the connections you had were in 4-5min and all you had to do was to change platforms (that much delay is not considered delay in India, in fact 30 min delay is not considered delay in India, the announcers at times will not even announce it). Whats even more amazing is that, there is a train-station at most major airports and airlines gave you a Rail-to-fly option, where you could buy a train ticket in the air-fare and travel to your international airport, by train. I guess, these are some of the benefits of paying high taxes in Europe, but it makes things so very convenient for new-comers.

I often wonder, why the US Government does not spend the stimulus money on developing a powerful rail network. Come to think of it, the fantastic highways of this country (Auto-Bahns are better, but the reach of the US highway system is amazing and the quality is pretty good too), were built during the Great Depression and still doing a great service even now, so why not spend this stimulus money on a Rail Network, that would create jobs and would at the same time make this fantastic country more accesible.

Anyways, I hope to travel more often by train in the US than on flights or in a car during this life-time of mine. Till then, I wish I could visit Europe more often, enjoy the many interesting places that the continent has to offer and travel on its fabulous train network more often. I also wish our own Indian trains got faster and I am able to visit Bangalore from Pune in less than 12 hours.

Nine Lives

Its been three weeks in the USA and given that its extremely cold outside, there is not much to do on the weekends and as such I have been able to catch up on some reading. One of the books that I read during this time is "Nive Lives", William Dalrymple's latest book.

India, its history, its recent rise as a potential economic power and prophecies of it becoming a super-power have been subjects of many books in the recent past. But here is a book that goes slightly off the beaten track and attempts to describe the role of the sacred or the place of religion in the lives of people in the sub-continent. Dalrymple, goes off to do what he does best, write a travelogue describing the lives of nine deeply religious people from across the sub-continent in a very impersonal, objective and matter-of-fact way. His objectiveness is particularly evident when he describes obscure practices and rituals of Tantriks and Bauls, which at times involve animal sacrifice, sex etc. These practices do not come out to the reader as wrong or right or gaudy, but just the way they are, with the author trying to explore the genesis of such rituals.

In the process of writing the book, the author once again travels the length and breadth of the sub-continent.

Sindh, Kangra/Dhramasala, Kerala, Karnataka, Bengal, Gujrat are some of the places the author visits. Stories span various religions from the extremely ascetic Jainism, Tibetan Buddhism, the Tantric sect of the Hindu Religion to the Sufism of the Sindh and are mostly set in small-town India where the place of religion and the sacred still plays a very important role in the lives of people. During this process the author visits some of the most unusal places and talks to some people that we folks living in Urban India and working in air-conditioned offices cannot even dream off.A crematorium in Tarapith with skulls and Tantriks being just one example of what I am talking about. It just goes on to show us folks that there is a world out there that we dont even know exists.The author also hints in some of the stories how religion and some rituals like the "theyyam" in Kerala, enable the dancer to transcend to a certain extent the barriers of caste.

So what did I learn from the book.Given that, I am not that pious or religious (I had hinted about it in my blog on Shegaon), but given that I am to a certain extent spiritual, I think the book demonstrates the power of the mind and ability of the mind to transcend the material and that human beings are capable of the unthinkable provided, they are able to train their mind and the thoughts that emanate from it.

 

In general, I think the book is a great read, but to be expected by a writer who gave us some amazing books like "In Xanudu", "The City of Djinns", "The Age of Kali". It is a travelogue from the author after quite a while. I would say that Dalrymple is certainly one of the best "Travel Writers" of recent times and I whole-heartedly recommend "Nine Lives"