An Enchanting Tale Of Our Tour Of South India-Part 1 of 20

This is a travelogue. But it is more than a just a simple narration of a journey. It has so many thrills that one might feel that indeed sometimes facts can be stranger than fiction.

Some incidents in the above tour are still etched in my memory viz., A scary train journey; being locked up in a cage for about six hours; astonishment on seeing a mountain of money and jewels; miraculous meeting with a family friend with whom we had lost touch for more than a decade; taking 26 baths within one hour; Mother nature’s hand in helping to retrieve a valuable ornament that we had given up as lost; an unknown person going out of his way to help when there was no hope; meeting five divinely beautiful looking girls under one roof; crying my heart out after witnessing a pitiful incident; witnessing railway police force conducting a search operation; a sleeping session that lasted for 14-hours, and many more.

I would like to share with you the details of the above anecdotes in the upcoming episodes.

This narrative, I believe, would also be of great interest to especially the Gen Y and Gen Z kids as it would allow them to have a peek into the life that prevailed about five decades ago.

Now, let us move on to the story.

INTRODUCTION:

It’s been 15 years since my father left for the heavenly abode. He passed away on the 3rd of April 2008.

I have so many fond memories of my father. But today I would like to share with you one of his greatest passions viz., traveling to different places in the Country, with his family. By the time I finished college, thanks to him, I had then already visited about fifty percent of the important places in the country.

Among the many tours he took us, the one we made of the south Indian states in the year 1975, is still etched in my memory for the following reasons:

Tour objective: To visit 32 places in 32 days. Some of the important places we visited were viz., Madras, Kanchipuram, Tirupathi, Thiruvannamalai, Chidambaram, Kumbakonam, Tanjore, Tiruchy, Rameswaram, Madurai, Tirunelveli, Trivandrum, Kanyakumari, Kodaikanal, Coimbatore, Thrissur etc.

I think the above list would have given you an idea about the enormity of the plan. It was quite the longest tour of my life, based on the number of days on road. Thirty-two days it took us to cover almost the entire states of Tamil Nadu, South Kerala and a few places in Andhra Pradesh. We started from Madras on the 19th of May 1975 and returned on the 19th of June 1975. My father made an incredibly meticulous plan to cover not only all major and minor pilgrimage spots but also various other tourist spots. The plan was to travel by train only so as to avail the hefty discount available on circular tickets.

My father had an encyclopedic knowledge of the above places, especially the temples. He would narrate in detail the importance of every one of the pilgrimage spots with the special significance of the temples and their deities vis-à-vis our heritage and culture. And every evening while in the hotel room or waiting on the railway platform, I would religiously jot down his narratives in a diary that I carried during the tour.

Tour Hurdles: The first hurdle was getting the Railway authorities to issue a circular ticket as per my father’s plan. The mandarins of South-Eastern Railway proved to be tough customers. However, my father prevailed over them by his sheer perseverance. The second hurdle was a bolt from the blue, in the form of shortage of coal. It played havoc with the already tight budget he had.

My father vs. the mandarins of South-Eastern Railway:

Those days Indian Railways used to issue concessional Tickets for tourists traveling by train. The discount used to be attractive. But then there were certain conditions, as under:

The length of the tour should not be less than 2400 km.

The route should invariably be round tours and not merely return journeys by the same or alternate route.

The total chargeable distance should not be less than 3 times* the chargeable distance between the originating station and the farthest station, by the shortest route.

(Note: *later on I understood this requirement of condition (c). You see the shortest route between the two furthest points is the diameter of the circle, say, ’d’. And the circular route that you will be taking is the circumference of the circle, which is πd. Now we all know π=3.14. So, to make a plan circular in nature, Railways must have gone for this condition, 3 times.)

When my father drew and submitted his plan for a circular tour of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the South-Eastern Railway administration rejected it on the following grounds:

The distance by the shortest route from Madras to Kanyakumari (the two extreme points in the plan) is 824 km. The total circular distance covered under your plan is 2376 km only and not 2472 km (3 times 824 km). So, it doesn’t conform to conditions a) and c), above. Hence, rejected.

Now my father was not a person to give up without a fight. This was his dream project and he had worked on it for so many days to ensure that all the conditions for the issue of circular tickets were fully complied with. You will get an idea of the enormity of the task in the ensuing paragraphs. So armed with his handwritten plan and the Bradshaw he laid siege to the office of the Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) of the SE Railway Headquarters in Kolkata. The discussions with the CCO went on for quite a while and at the end of it, the CCO was so impressed with my father’s detailed plan that he acceded to his request with some additions/amendments.

Shortage of coal supply and a Shoestring budget.

During 1975 the country was passing through a coal supply crisis and one of the worst affected sectors was the Railways. Those days except for some selected trains, the majority of the trains were pulled by steam engines. Our travel plan was mostly dependent on short-haul passenger trains which were invariably pulled by steam engines. It so happened that many times we used to arrive at the station only to find that the train was canceled due to the non-availability of engines because of coal shortage. We had to then wait for the next train. But this option was not always feasible, as time was of the essence in our tight tour schedule. So, we had to take a bus to reach the next destination. This was a costly alternative and not factored into the budget. So, on many occasions, to save on hotel room rent, we spent the night in railway waiting rooms. Here, it must be said that during those days Southern Railway had well-maintained waiting halls not only in important junctions but also in small towns.

In the ensuing episodes of this travelogue, I will be sharing various anecdotes from our tour.