It was in July 2008, the train whistled and moved forward making it’s usual rattling sound. Although this wasn’t unusual for the train, it was for me. I woke up and the light from the Sun was just trying to explain me they were the last rays which visited the east a few minutes back, they are the first rays waking you up… I just peeped out of the window. My eyes focusing on something that it had never seen before, still focusing on it and feeling amused by the dream which it had presented to the mind. A yellow board went past, the train slowed down and the rattling sound became more dispersed… I suddenly woke up and came out of the compartment; just to make sure what I saw till now was just a dream.
The freshness of the air made me feel eternal. My eyes saw people around… people who were fishermen, people who were religious, people who were businessmen, people dressed in different clothes, people speaking different languages… Feeling still in the dream world, I just leaned out of the door… I spotted a yellow board which had three words arranged as the vertices of an equilateral triangle. The top vertex looked like a brahmi or Indus script to me… the left most vertex looked a lot more similar but still felt ignorant… now my pupil adjusted itself to the rightmost vertex which to the best of my knowledge read “CHILKA”.
I just leaped back… The train had just reached the Chilka lake station en route to Bhubaneswar. The cold wind that carried the warmth and vapor of the largest lake in India slashed my face. The train left the station, promising me an experience I had never felt in my life. I was witnessing the land blessed enough to receive the first rays of light! The landscape with water, water and water everywhere… with tiny little twigs just peeping out of the water to pay their respects to the star that had brought the first life on this beautiful planet called earth. Flowers, trees, birds and animals preparing for yet another day of hard, selfless work which they were bestowed upon by Nature. I didn’t find words to express my happiness, joy and I truly felt so proud and blessed to be part of this land, the land which showed the world how to LIVE 4000 years back! When there was hardly any human population when compared to today’s demography. The land which survived more than 6000 years just to prove to the rest of the world the strength and faith it was built on.
I had once heard how Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the Bengal poet had composed one of the famous and evergreen poems of Indian history. He was such a patriotic poet that he considered Bharathavarsha(the subcontinent) as the Mother and its people as her children. Feeling terribly sad about the fact that Bharathavarsha, which stood across millennia without any disruption… which stood like a backbone to many other civilizations, had bent its back to the savaging act of the west.. In 1875 when he was traveling from Calcutta to his birth place Kanthalapada in a train, the greenery, the colorful flowers, the sound of the birds made him to close his eyes. What then came out of his mind were just not lyrics of an ordinary poetry but a language that generated patriotism never seen before in the minds of the people. A language that would remain a spectacle and always remind each Indian his role for the country… That song was
Please read the English translation of this [here]. It was truly an amazing feeling which brought tears in my eyes.. the first tears for my country. This was eight months back, the pleasant sight that I had that day on my way to Bhubaneswar… Please forgive me and yourself if you have felt that I have just exaggerated my experience…
