Jajabara in the US of A Part VII: Harlem Hugged Me Tight

Everyone said — leave the car in Philadelphia, take the train.

I followed the advice, which for someone who had spent the better part of this trip ignoring plans and inventing alternatives, felt like a small act of maturity. The Jetta was returned. I boarded the train. New York arrived the way New York always does — suddenly, loudly, without preamble, as if it had been there all along and you were the one who had taken too long.

I had been here before. In 2013, I had stayed with a friend in Brooklyn — the New York of neighbourhoods and bridges and a slightly more human scale. This time I was on my own, and I had made a decision before I arrived. I was going to stay in Harlem.

The reasons were known and unknown to me, even as I made the choice. Maybe it was the name and its ring — Harlem, a word that carries its own music. Maybe it was the stories, the history, the Harlem Renaissance and everything it had meant for Black art and culture and identity in America. Maybe it was simply that after days of rust belt loneliness and West Virginia woods and Philadelphia's revolutionary ghosts, I wanted to be somewhere that felt unguarded. Somewhere with no pretence.

Harlem delivered. And then some.

---

It hugged me from day one.

I stepped out for lunch and found Sylvia's — the famous soul food restaurant on Lenox Avenue that has been feeding Harlem since 1962. The food was the kind that makes you understand immediately why it is called soul food — generous, warm, deeply seasoned, the culinary equivalent of a tight embrace. I ate well. I felt welcomed by the meal itself.

The days that followed had their own rhythm. Mornings on 125th Street, walking up and down the spine of the neighbourhood, ducking into small museums and bookshops that rewarded the unhurried browser. The Apollo Theatre — that legendary stage where Ella Fitzgerald won her first amateur night, where James Brown recorded a live album, where Harlem's cultural heartbeat has been measured for nearly a century. I stood outside it for a while, then went in, then stood some more.

In the small parks, people sat and smoked and danced with the particular joy of people who have decided that joy is not something to be postponed. No occasion required. No audience needed. An afternoon, a park bench, some music and some weed, and the simple business of being alive in a neighbourhood that knows how to live. I watched, I absorbed, I was grateful to be allowed to witness it.

Harlem Nights — the club — gave me an evening of exactly what the name promises. The neighbourhood, I discovered, does not perform its warmth. It simply has it, the way some people do, effortlessly and without thinking about it.

---

I had wanted, badly, to watch Hamilton on Broadway.

Alexander Hamilton — the immigrant who became the first Secretary of the Treasury, the man whose portrait I had seen on the ten dollar bill, whose story had been turned into a musical that the whole world seemed to have seen except me. Hamilton Grange, his home in Harlem, was one of my stops — the modest house where the great man had lived, tucked improbably into the neighbourhood that now carries his story in ways he could not have imagined. I visited. I paid my respects.

But Hamilton the musical was sold out. Completely, finally, unapologetically sold out.

I settled for Chicago at Broadway instead, which turned out to be no settling at all. The show was sensuous — a pure delight for the senses, jazz and style and showmanship woven together into something that made you understand why Broadway is Broadway. I left the theatre buzzing in the way that only live performance, done at its absolute best, can produce.

Dinner one evening was at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company at Times Square — touristy, cheerful, entirely unapologetic about being both, the shrimp excellent and the Times Square circus doing its thing outside the windows. I ate and watched the world perform itself.

Central Park I visited several times, each time finding a different version of it — the early morning park, the afternoon park, the park at that hour when the light goes golden and everyone seems to slow down slightly, as if by agreement.

I went up to Brooklyn — back to the borough that had housed me in 2013, familiar and changed at once, the way places you have known always are.

---

And then, towards the end of the week, I went looking for the Ashram.

The Self Realisation Fellowship in New York — the ashram of my guru, a quiet address in the middle of one of the loudest cities on earth. I had been moving for weeks. Airports and highways and mountain roads and ghost tours and soul food and Broadway and Harlem parks. I had covered ground — physical, emotional, spiritual — in quantities I had not fully accounted for. I needed, before the journey ended, to find my centre.

I found it there. A few moments of meditation, of genuine silence, of stillness that the city outside seemed to agree not to disturb. The kind of quiet that you can only fully appreciate after a great deal of noise. I sat. I breathed. I let the journey settle into me rather than chasing after the next thing.

It was, in its way, the most important stop of the entire trip.

---

The departure was quiet. A morning flight, the city still finding its feet as I made my way to the airport. No fanfare, no ceremony. The jajabara does not end with a bang — it simply becomes the past, which is where all good journeys eventually live.

Home and family were waiting.

That is both the simplest and the most complete thing I can say about why the road, however wonderful, is always something you leave. The wandering is real, the freedom is real, the loneliness and the beauty and the toothless signposts and the farmers and the Harlem parks and the Chesapeake Bay from above — all of it real, all of it worth every mile.

And yet.

S was waiting. The life I had left temporarily was waiting. India, with its noise and its chaos and its petrol station attendants who fill your tank and clean your windshield and ask — cash, card or UPI — was waiting.

I had driven from Normal, Illinois to Virginia on roads that run the heart of America. I had been lost in West Virginia woods and found by a farmer. I had eaten soul food in Harlem and watched Chicago on Broadway and sat in silence in an ashram and stood on a wooden deck over still water and rolled a cigarette and been, for a few weeks, entirely and completely free.

The road gives you that. And then it gives you back.

I was ready to go home. 

Part VI: Of Founding Fathers, Dark Alleys and a City That Wears Its Heart on Its Walls

 Twinkle Apa left for school early.

The goodbye was wistful — written clearly on her face even as she kept it brief, the way people do when they don't want a farewell to become one. She extracted a promise before she left — bring S next time. Her sister, my wife, who had known nothing of this adventure and would have opinions about it. I promised. It was the easiest promise to make at that hour of the morning.

It was left to the men — Subrat Bhai and me — to sort out the logistics. We drove to the Rent-A-Car outlet near Dulles Airport together. I missed Lola immediately and completely.

I picked up a Volkswagen Jetta. Large, beautiful, and grey — the same grey as my VW Polo back home in India, the same grey as the Nissan Altima that had carried me from Illinois to Virginia. There was something quietly reassuring about this, as if the trip had a colour scheme I had not chosen but was being faithful to regardless.

Subrat Bhai and I hugged. I went on my way.

The rain arrived almost immediately — first mild, then stronger, drumming on the roof of the Jetta with growing conviction. This was becoming a pattern. In Odia tradition, rain on an important occasion is auspicious — a blessing arriving uninvited and damp. I had now been blessed, by this reckoning, several times on this trip. I chose to take it that way.

---

Annapolis came first, as planned.

The town is smaller than its history suggests, which is part of its charm. The naval influence is everywhere — in the architecture, in the unhurried confidence of the streets, in the way the whole place seems to know it has earned its standing and feels no need to announce it loudly. I walked those streets with the particular pleasure that old port towns produce — the sense of centuries of arrivals and departures quietly accumulated in the stones underfoot.

I had soup and lunch at a café, then wandered into the Maryland State House for the legislative session — democracy in its working clothes, unglamorous and essential. After, I found a T-shirt shop, which produced the familiar and universal experience of being so overwhelmed by choice at the start that whatever you finally buy feels like the wrong decision by the time you reach the till. I bought something. I have already forgotten what.

The drive through Annapolis and out was lovely.

Delaware arrived next, quiet and brief — the First State, the first to ratify the Constitution, wearing this distinction with the modesty of someone who knows the fact matters more than the celebration. I stopped near Delaware City in the afternoon at a Mexican place for tacos, ate well, and drove on.

I only discovered much later that the daughter of my teacher, Madhu Pant madam, was working in the city. A coffee, a meal, a conversation missed entirely. But you cannot plan everything — and this trip had long since made peace with that.

Then the toll road offered me a choice — take the free route, or pay and cross over water.

I paid.

I had no idea what I was crossing. The map said Chesapeake Bay Bridge but the reality of it — driving above open water, the bay spreading in every direction, the scale of it only becoming clear once you were committed and on it — was something the map had not prepared me for. You feel, on a bridge like that, simultaneously very small and strangely invincible. The engineering of it — the audacity of laying a road across a stretch of sea and then driving cars across it as a matter of daily routine — produces a specific kind of awe. Human beings, I thought, are capable of remarkable things when they decide to be.

I reached Philadelphia as the evening was beginning.

---

My Airbnb host had warned me about the parking. Philadelphia and its parking, she said, were a matter requiring preparation, patience and possibly prayer. I found a spot on the street within minutes, in the manner of someone who has spent years navigating Delhi. Some skills transfer across continents.

The city met me at every corner with graffiti.

Not the hasty, throwaway kind — the kind that has something to say and has decided that walls are the right place to say it. Messages of identity, of protest, of solidarity, of defiance and belonging and the complicated business of existing in a city that contains multitudes. You understand very quickly that Philadelphia is an inclusive city — not as a policy or a slogan but as a texture, something you feel in the streets before anyone tells you.

I signed up for walking tours. Multiple ones, spread across two days — the Constitutional Walking Tour being the centrepiece, taking in Independence Hall, Liberty Bell and the streets where the American republic was argued into existence. Benjamin Franklin is inescapable in this city, and rightly so. The man was a polymath of the most extravagant kind — the first Postmaster General of the United States, a founder of what would become the University of Pennsylvania, a scientist, a diplomat, a writer, a printer, an inventor. The bifocals. The lightning rod. The almanac. Philadelphia wears his memory the way cities wear their best buildings — proudly, and everywhere.

The Quakers too have left their mark — in the architecture, in certain civic instincts of the place, in the quiet insistence on conscience that runs through Philadelphia's history like a thread you keep finding in different rooms.

---

But the tour that stayed with me longest was the Dark Philly tour.

Ghosts and prostitution — that was the billing, and it delivered on both counts with considerable enthusiasm. The history of vice in Philadelphia turns out to be rich, detailed and, at certain points, featuring some of the most celebrated names in American history. The founding fathers, those marble men of monument and currency, had feet of clay in ways that the Constitutional Walking Tour had not mentioned. There were the Yellow Pages equivalents of their era — directories of available company, matter of fact and businesslike. There were names in those directories that would have caused considerable difficulty had they appeared on the historical plaques we had admired earlier in the day.

I walked back to my Airbnb that night with a considerably more complete picture of the city that had launched a nation. More human, somehow. More real.

Next day morning was devoted to Rocky Balboa at the Museum of Arts.

Two days in Philadelphia. Not enough and exactly right.

---

I loaded the Jetta and pointed it north toward New York. The last leg. The end of the road, or at least this road.

Philadelphia shrank in the rear view mirror, its graffiti and its founding fathers and its Dark Tour ghosts receding together. Ahead, the city that needs no introduction was waiting — loud and tall and entirely itself.

The jajabara had one more chapter left.

Tamas: Where the Stage Becomes a Mirror

A personal essay on the NSD Repertory Company's production at the Summer Theatre Festival

The opening scene told me everything I needed to know. Before a single word was spoken, the set announced itself — grand, layered, a visual feast of the kind that the National School of Drama Repertory Company has made its unmistakable hallmark. And then the music began. Not from some invisible corner of the wings, but loud and emotive singing from the actors themselves, on stage — music so carefully chosen and so organically woven into the fabric of the narrative that it ceased to be accompaniment and became the play's very bloodstream.

I had been wanting to encounter Tamas for a long time. Bhisham Sahni's novel had sat on the edges of my reading life, always deferred; the celebrated television series with Om Puri had similarly eluded me. So when the NSD Repertory Company staged Vibhajan Vibhishika — Tamas as part of their Summer Theatre Festival, it felt less like watching a play and more like finally keeping a long-overdue appointment with a part of our history.

Powerful acting and strong casting are, with the NSD, almost a given. These are professionals shaped by years of rigorous training and then honed further by the demands of a performing repertory company. But where this production scaled genuinely newer heights was in its theatrical imagination — in its daring choices of form and staging. There is a scene where three actors, dressed identically, impersonating the same person, emerge simultaneously from different directions, converging on one of the protagonists. The effect is not merely visual — it is psychological, almost hallucinatory. Fear, worry, mental unraveling: the protagonist conveyed all of these at once, and the staging made you feel each one separately. Brilliant.

Then there were the mob scenes. The easy choice would have been noise — shouting, chaos, the full volume of human violence. Instead, the directors chose silence. The cries and clashes of rioting crowds were rendered through violent, contorted movements of hands and faces — a choreography of horror without sound. Sometimes the noise began and then was drained away into an unbearable quiet. The choice was deliberate, and it was devastating.

The use of props was, as one would expect, precisely calibrated: swords when the moment called for them, guns when a shot had to be fired, sticks to make a point. Nothing excessive, nothing absent.

I come to Partition-themed work with a particular personal weight. One of the first plays I performed in Delhi — at the India Habitat Centre — was Kharashein, written by Gulzar. That encounter shook me. The violence and brutality with which human beings can turn upon one another in the grip of a communal frenzy — the fire, the blood, the gore — seemed almost unthinkable. It marked me.

But Tamas does something more unsettling than depicting violence. It exposes the architecture behind it. It shows, with unflinching clarity, that the riots are rarely as spontaneous as they appear — that there are engineers, profiteers, and political orchestrators working in the shadows. A quiet bedtime conversation between the British Deputy Commissioner and his wife. A petty squabble between political leaders. A local strongman pulling strings from a distance, for purposes that have nothing to do with God, religion or culture. The audience is made to see this slowly, through accumulation — a hint here, a gesture there — and the realisation creeps up on you like cold water.

And the people who actually die, who lose their homes and families and everything they have — they believe they are fighting a righteous battle. They feel they are acting on God's will, or their community's honour, or their own wounded pride. They have no idea they are pawns. They have no agency. That is the most unbearable thing Tamasforces you to sit with.

Tamas — darkness — is the right word. But Sahni's darkness, as rendered on this stage, comes in two registers. First it erupts: violent, volcanic, like molten lava pouring out of the crater of a riot. And then, when the lava cools, you see what remains — not clean ash, but something far worse: the dark, stagnant waste water that surrounds us always, filled with the organic and inorganic debris of our own nature, our own capacity for complicity and silence.

Go. If the NSD Repertory Company's Summer Theatre Festival is still running, go. If it is not, watch for the next one. These are plays that do not merely entertain — they insist, quietly and powerfully, that you look at yourself

Jajabara in the US of A (Part V: Hola Familia, Lola and the Road That Runs America)

 Virginia announced itself gently.

The mountains of West Virginia had been dramatic and demanding — beautiful in the way that requires your full attention. Virginia was different. Around Middleburg, the land softened into something almost European — pretty houses set back from the road, fields rolling easy and wide, hedgerows and horses and a particular quality of afternoon light that made everything look considered, composed, like someone had arranged it all with care. If West Virginia was a poem that grabbed you by the collar, Virginia was one you found on a quiet shelf and kept returning to.

I kept looking at the signposts of Highway 50 E, that has been the North Star to my compass and a familiar friend. How a particular font, colour and design connects with you in a situation is quite something in the trivia that’s life! 

I was heading to Aldie. A small, unhurried town in Loudoun County where Twinkle Apa and Subrat Bhai had made their home with their two daughters and, newest to the family, a dog called Lola.

---

I had been to this house before. In 2013, on my last visit to America — the trip where I had landed at Dulles International and Twinkle Apa had come to pick me up. Her younger daughter Sayona had been barely a year old then, carried in arms, all eyes and unawareness. Her elder daughter Ishu had been in Grade 3 or 4, small and curious. Twelve years is a long time. Ishu was now at UCLA. Sayona was in Grade 8. The house was the same, the warmth was the same, but time had done what time does — quietly and completely rearranged everything within the familiar outline.

Subrat Bhai was in the driveway when I pulled in.

He gave me a tight hug — the kind that needs no words and uses none. And then Lola arrived, all energy and enthusiasm and absolutely no concept of personal space, jumping at me with the complete conviction that this was the correct response to a guest arriving after a long journey. She was not wrong.

Lola was social, vibrant, and entirely certain of her own importance in any room or driveway she occupied. We became friends immediately, which is the only speed at which you can become friends with a dog like Lola.

---

I had been alone for days. Not unhappily alone — the solitude of the road had been chosen, enjoyed, wrestled with and ultimately cherished. But alone nonetheless. And now here was Twinkle Apa's warmth, familiar food, familiar language, the sound of a household going about its life around me. I felt it settle over me like a blanket you had forgotten you owned.

I stayed four days.

We walked Lola through the neighbourhood in the mornings, which Lola treated as a serious professional obligation. We drove to Manassas National Battlefield Park, where the Civil War had been fought in the fields that now lay quiet and marked with careful signage — the details, the dates, the human cost of it all laid out with the solemn precision that American historical parks do very well. It was impressive in the way that places of genuine consequence always are, even when the grass has grown back and the cannons have been made decorative.

The drives around Virginia were done in Subrat Bhai and Twinkle Apa's Tesla. I was not consulted about this arrangement. The couple had heard a summary of my West Virginia adventures — the GPS gone, the toothless signpost, the farmer, the unpaved road, the fuel warning — and had reached a swift and unanimous verdict. No more driving for the guest. I debated this with them, twice, with diminishing conviction each time. The Tesla stayed in their hands. I sat in the back with Lola, which was, I will admit, not a bad outcome.

---

I did win one small negotiation. Philadelphia.

It had not been part of any plan — nothing about this trip had been particularly faithful to plans — but I had read about it and could not walk past it. The first capital of the United States, the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed, where the Constitution was written, where a young nation had argued itself into existence. I would drive there on my way to New York.

On the way, the road made one more spontaneous offer and I accepted it — Annapolis, Maryland. A port town of quiet beauty and deep history, sitting where the Severn River meets the Chesapeake Bay. I found myself, by a series of small accidents of timing and curiosity, inside a live legislative session. I watched the proceedings for a while, understanding some of it, moved by the ordinariness of democracy in action — the arguing, the procedure, the patient accumulation of governance. Then I stepped back out into the Annapolis afternoon.

---

Before Philadelphia, there was one final errand. I drove the Nissan Altima to Chantilly to return it.

On the way, I stopped at Manassas — the battlefield again, this time alone, on my own time, with the particular attention you can only give a place when no one is waiting. And somewhere in the logistics of the return, I made a discovery. I had a whole day saved. An entire day that I had not accounted for, had not planned around, had simply driven into existence by covering more ground than I had imagined possible.

A colleague had told me this before I left — you always underestimate how much you can drive in America. I had nodded politely and not quite believed him. He was right. America is a country that runs on roads and is, in some essential way, run by them. The highway is not just infrastructure here — it is identity, it is freedom, it is the original promise of the place made physical and paved.

I handed back the keys to the Nissan Altima at Chantilly. It had carried me from Normal, Illinois to Virginia — through Route 66 and Highway 50, through thunderstorms and mountain roads without signal, through rust belt towns and West Virginia woods, past a signpost with a toothless grin and down an unpaved road a farmer had pointed me toward on faith alone.

It was an unassuming car. It did not let me down once.

---

Now it was the move to Sunny Philly? I must confess that I watched the movie Philadelphia starring the magnificent Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington - my men !! 

Jajabara in the US of A (Part III: The Loneliest Road - the Dust and the Rust)

The rain and thunderstorm from the previous evening had not entirely made up its mind.

I watched the news before sleep took me — equal parts weather forecast and optimism, washed down with some food I had carried from the café in St. Louis. The risk was not rhetorical. Tornadoes in middle America are not metaphors. They are real, they are sudden, and the loneliest road in America would be a particularly poor place to meet one. I filed this thought under "things to worry about tomorrow" and let the tiredness of the day — the concentration, the rain, the accidental state-crossing — pull me under.

Morning proved the optimism correct.

---

I looked out of the window and the sky was clear. But it was not the weather that held me. It was the water.

Right behind the motel room at Super 8 (run by Indians), quiet and unhurried, ran a small stream that opened into what was unmistakably a private lake. Ducks — white, unhurried, indifferent to me — dotted its edges. I stood there after breakfast for a while, watching them, thinking about the lake.

In India, a body of water like this would have seventeen competing claims on it — the government, the village panchayat, the farmer next door, the man who has been washing his buffalo in it for forty years. Here, someone had simply put a fence around it and called it theirs. America has been blessed with more natural resources than almost any nation on earth. It has also, I thought, been blessed with a remarkable appetite to capture, own and label them. The ducks had no opinion on the matter.

I took the car out for a slow drive through Vincennes before leaving. I hovered around the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park — that grand rotunda built to honour the Revolutionary War general who wrestled the Northwest Territory from the British. It sat there magnificently, a little too large for its surroundings, the way American monuments often do. I was too restless to go inside. This is something I was beginning to understand about myself on a road trip — the road takes priority. Everything else gets demoted. Museums, historical sites, the carefully curated versions of places — all secondary. The place itself, lived in and moving, is what the road offers.

---

Lagootee arrived next. A small, middle-of-nowhere town that the highway had not forgotten but the world largely had. Someone had mentioned it was close to Amish country and I had been quietly hoping — the Amish, that extraordinary community that has chosen a different bargain with modernity, were something I had only seen on television. I wanted to see a horse-drawn buggy. I wanted to see the hats.

Instead, I walked into a diner and found something equally worth seeing — a full house of sixty-plus year olds, four or five waitresses also of similar age at ease with each other like a family, and a level of conversation and banter that needed no translation. These women knew every customer by name, knew their orders before they sat down, knew which one needed more coffee and which one needed more sympathy. The omelette was excellent. The coffee was strong. The Amish were elsewhere, and I did not miss them.

Outside Lagootee, I had my first solo encounter with an American gas station.

In India, pulling into a petrol station is a full-service production. Someone waves you in, someone else asks — cash, card or UPI — a third person handles the nozzle, and if you are lucky, someone offers to wipe your windshield. You sit in your car like a person of leisure while the world organises itself around your fuel tank.

Here — a machine, a card slot, a series of prompts, and the distinct impression that the machine was mildly impatient with me. I recalled every instruction Soumya provided me. I followed every step. I filled the tank. No help, no guidance, no human involvement whatsoever. A small and private victory, celebrated alone in a car park outside Lagootee, Indiana.

---

The drive east from here was where the road began to tell a different story.

The Rust Belt. A phrase that sounds almost romantic until you drive through it. Town after town that had once hummed with industry and population, now wearing a hollowed-out look — discoloured houses, broken fences, overgrown lawns, shops shuttered so long the signs had faded. These were not abandoned places. People lived here, families persisted, curtains moved in windows. But the prosperity that had once organised these towns around it had quietly packed up and left, and what remained was the structure without the pulse.

I stopped for coffee in one of these towns. Walked in. The few people inside looked up with the particular attention reserved for something genuinely unexpected. I was, in that room, an alien. Not unwelcome — just entirely improbable. I drank my coffee. We exchanged nods. I left.

I crossed from Indiana into Kentucky briefly — the road dipping into a third state almost as an aside — and then into Ohio, the land flattening and widening with each mile.

---

I crossed briefly through Kentucky — the road dipping south almost as a casual aside — and then into Ohio before the day finally drew me into Chillicothe.

Chillicothe is one of those American towns that carries more history than its current size suggests — Ohio's first state capital, ancient Hopewell culture earthworks buried in its surroundings. I knew none of this then. What I found was a pub dedicated to Highway 50, warm inside, unhurried, with good beer and decent food and the kind of atmosphere that a long day of driving makes feel like paradise.

I had a couple of beers. I had food. I was content in the specific way that only honest tiredness and honest hunger, both met at once, can produce. Yet again, talking about regrets, I should have bought some more highway 50 merchandise as memorabilia.  

The route maps and details in the planned kept referring to mounds and I was keen to explore them - but I realised you need to know about something for you to be excited about it. What it is? What it was? What it could be? I missed the mounds despite their highlighted importance. 

I did not want to miss a good night’s sleep. The motel (again run by an Indian family) that night was however a different matter.

Practically empty. Situated beside a freeway that did not sleep, massive trucks announcing themselves through the thin walls at regular intervals. Around it, the kind of vast empty American space that looks fine in daylight and deeply unsettling at night — a car park the size of a small town, pools of orange light, nothing moving except perhaps some shadows.

I was the only guest, as far as I could tell. But I had company, the cleaner of the room had left a small hand written note for the guest ! The gesture brought the human connection to a rather inhuman situation. I wrote something back and left a tip. 

I locked the door. I did not investigate further. The road, I reminded myself, was waiting in the morning.

It always was.

Jajabara in the US of A (Part IV: Mountain Mama, a Signpost and the Road Home)

I was out of Chillicothe before the town had properly woken up.

The ritual was the same as Soumya's driveway — unpack little the night before, pack in the morning with deliberate care, restore a sense of order before surrendering to the beautiful disorder of the road. There is something about this routine that I was beginning to trust. The packing was the last thing I controlled. After that, the road decided.

And today, the road was taking me to West Virginia.

I had heard West Virginia in songs before I had ever looked at it on a map. Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong — West Virginia, mountain mama. 

I had been fascinated by mountains my whole life and I could see them assembling on the horizon as I drove out of Ohio through Athens and then Parkersburg, the land gathering itself upward, the sky getting closer. It was one of the finest days of driving I have ever had. The road curved and the mountains curved with it, the trees pressing in on both sides, the occasional car ahead disappearing around a bend like a thought you almost had.

Soumya's voice was in my ear, as it had been since Normal — follow the speed limit signs and you will navigate well. I followed. I navigated. I was happy.

Then I crossed the West Virginia river, saw the signboard welcoming me to the Mountain State, and the phone signal quietly disappeared.

---

It did not happen all at once. First patchy, then unreliable, then gone. The GPS screen stared at me blankly. I was in proper woods now — thin at first, then thick, the big trees closing over the road like a roof. I was enjoying it. Eyes on the road, carefully reading each curve, the scenic beauty arriving from all directions — ahead, both sides, the rear view mirror framing what I was leaving behind like a painting I would never own.

Then the road ended.

A closure. Unmarked on any map I had, unannounced by any signal I could receive. I sat there for a moment and took stock — no GPS, no signal, no data, no way to call anyone, printed maps that showed roads but not this particular problem. Just instinct and road signs and whatever came next.

I turned left.

Not knowing where it would take me. Whether it would fold back onto the road I had been on or carry me somewhere else entirely. This is the thing about decisions — you never fully know. There are parallel lives waiting at every fork, diverging infinitely, never intersecting. Richard Bach explored this in One and in other books — the idea that every choice creates a version of you that goes the other way. Robert Frost, of course, said it first and said it better. Two roads in a wood. I took the one that turned left and told myself it would make all the difference.

The big trees blocked the sunlight. The road narrowed. And then I found it — a small water body, still and dark, with a wooden deck extending over it. I parked. I walked to the edge of the deck. Across the water, an abandoned house looked back at me, windows empty, roof patient. I rolled a cigarette and stood there.

Nothing crossed the road. Nothing hurried me. No sound that needed answering, no phone that could ring. I was completely with myself, in a way that a city, a conference, a full life of obligations rarely permits. This moment was entirely mine. I stayed until I was ready to leave, which is the only correct amount of time to stay anywhere.

---

Then I drove for another hour and the solitude began to shift from beautiful to unsettling.

Where were the other cars? No one was overtaking me, no one was coming the other way. The road kept offering itself ahead and I kept accepting it, but with decreasing confidence. Whom would I ask, if I needed to ask? There was no one to ask.

And then the signpost appeared.

It said, verbatim, in letters that left no room for interpretation — YOUR GPS IS WRONG. PLEASE GO BACK.

I was shell-shocked. Every Hollywood film I had ever watched in which a group of travellers ventures into the American wilderness and meets some unspeakable country legend came flooding back simultaneously. I sat with this information for a moment, in a car, on a road that had just been told to go back, in the middle of West Virginia, with no signal and no fuel to spare.

Then someone arrived.

A farmer. Friendly, unhurried, entirely unbothered by the sight of an Indian man staring in panic at a signpost in his woods. He knew exactly what my situation was — he had, I suspect, seen this before. He directed me to a small unpaved road that wound down from where we stood. I had no choice but to trust him completely, which is the most exposed kind of trust there is.

I drove down the unpaved road. It was not built for a Nissan Altima. I leaned in, kept it slow, kept it careful. It seemed to go on forever, the trees pressing closer, the surface making its objections felt through the steering wheel.

Then, in my rear-view mirror — headlights. Another car, behind me, on the same impossible road.

Every Hollywood instinct fired at once. I gripped the wheel. I kept driving. And then, in the way that ordinary reality eventually asserts itself over an overactive imagination, both of us emerged onto something resembling a proper motorway, the other driver peeling off without drama, without incident, without being any kind of country legend at all.

I checked my printed maps. I could not work out where I was — no signpost, no landmark I could match to anything on paper. I knew only that Aurora and Romney lay ahead, if I was on the right road. I was mixing up Aurora with Anora — the Oscar-winning film — in my head, which tells you something about the state of my concentration at this point.

Then the fuel warning light came on.

---

I drove twenty more miles on patience and an impatient heart before civilisation appeared — an island of it, surrounded by mountains and streams and trees and animals and the vast indifference of wild America. There was a gas station. A big, tall girl came out before I had fully stopped and did the filling herself, which after my proud solo performance outside Lagootee felt both like a slight and a relief.

Inside was a store that sold everything. Of course it did — there would be nothing else for fifty or seventy miles in any direction. But more than the store, there was a community. People having breakfast together, collecting their weekly groceries, talking to each other with the ease of people who have no choice but to know one another well. I joined them for a while. I explained my trip — the Indian driving Highway 50 alone, the GPS gone, the signpost, the farmer, the unpaved road. They listened with the generous attention of people who have time and are not pretending otherwise. And they confirmed, which was the most important thing, that I was on the right road. Romney was ahead.

---

Romney stole something from me. So did Winchester, Virginia, which came shortly after.

Romney is the oldest town in West Virginia, though it wears this quietly. Winchester was full of flowers — it was March, and March in Virginia means blooms everywhere, small streams running clear, cafés with their doors open to the new warmth. I should have stopped. I wanted to stop. But Twinkle Apa and Subrat Bhai were waiting in Virginia with their daughter and their dog, and the pull of family — of known warmth after days of beautiful uncertainty — was stronger than any café or flowering street.

Some places you promise to return to. Winchester is on that list.

I drove on. The mountains gave way, the road widened, the signs began to count down the miles to Virginia. The jajabara was not over — but the wandering part of it was drawing to its close, and something warmer was waiting at the other end.

I put my foot down. I had earned this arrival.

Jajabara in the US of A (Part II: Of a Sleeping Town, a Kind Waitress and an Accidental Exit)

The loneliness started right after Normal.

Not a bad loneliness. Not the kind that unsettles. The kind that clarifies. The Nissan Altima and I slipped onto the highway and the world quietly rearranged itself into just two things — the road ahead and the bright Illinois sun coming straight at my face. The AC was perfect. The steering was responsive. The acceleration, smooth. I had worried about this car, this road, this side of the road. The car, at least, had decided not to worry with me.

It did not take long to notice something that the maps had hinted at but the road made obvious — Route 66 and the new freeway run almost parallel to each other, like an old story and its modern retelling. The Mother Road, all nostalgia and legend, quietly keeping pace with the interstate that replaced it. I found this strangely moving.

---

Lincoln, IL arrived on a Sunday morning, and Lincoln, IL was very much asleep.

This was the town named after Abraham Lincoln before he was Abraham Lincoln — before the presidency, before the legend, before the memorial. He christened it himself, this little town, with the juice of a watermelon, or so the story goes. I had expected something of that energy — some small civic pride on display, perhaps a statue mid-gesture, a diner with his face on the menu. What I found instead was a main square so quiet you could hear your own footsteps.

The deserted look of the town matched that of the road I had expected to be so happening. Route 66 — the most romanticised highway in the world — and on a Sunday morning in Lincoln, Illinois, it felt like everyone had been given the same memo to stay home.

I was hungry. I looked for a coffee shop and found instead a cheerful little store selling American merchandise — the kind of place that sells everything from fridge magnets to flags to things you didn't know you needed. I browsed. I bought nothing. Then I found coffee and some breakfast, and a newly opened bookshop that had no business being as good as it was in a town that was still rubbing its eyes. I encircled the main square once — still deserted — and pointed the Altima south towards St. Louis.

---

My colleague Kumud had lived in the US for a few years and had offered, with the generosity of someone who has genuinely been there, a fair amount of warning about St. Louis. He was descriptive. He was specific. He was, I would discover, not wrong.

I arrived in St. Louis excited nonetheless — the kind of excitement that a fair warning produces rather than diminishes. I pulled in for lunch and parked on the road. And then, sitting in the restaurant, I understood precisely what Kumud had meant. The worry about the car parked outside did not entirely leave me through the meal.

The food was good. The waitress was heavily pregnant, petite, and kinder than the afternoon required — she brought extra portions of bread without being asked, twice. These are the people you remember on a long road. Not the landmarks. The people.

I did look up for the Arch — you cannot miss the Gateway Arch, that great gleaming curve over the Mississippi, America's monument to its own westward ambition. I saw it. But what caught my eye and held it longer were the flowers growing alongside the road. Wildflowers, ordinary and unannounced, doing what wildflowers do — blooming without occasion.

And then, without entirely meaning to, I had exited St. Louis.

I realised this a few minutes later and kept driving. What was I going to do — go back? I was on the road precisely to be on the road. The exit, accidental as it was, felt like the right decision.

---

The plan had been to stop at Salem or Lawrenceville, both in southern Illinois, both reasonable places to end a first day. Then the rain arrived.

It did not drizzle. It battered. The kind of rain that makes you grip the wheel a little tighter and lean forward slightly as if that helps. Here I was — first day alone on American roads, wrong side of the car, unfamiliar state, and the sky had chosen this precise evening to make a point.

I remember thinking — why this challenge on the first day itself?

And then, almost immediately — well. You wanted this, didn't you?

I drove on. Through the rain, through Salem, through Lawrenceville, through the rest of southern Illinois which slid past in the dark and the wet. Somewhere along the way I crossed into Indiana without ceremony or intention. The rain did not let up. The road did not offer explanation.

Vincennes, Indiana appeared, and I let it stop me.

A motel. A room. Dry. I had driven through an entire state in a rainstorm on my first day alone in America and arrived, unplanned, in a city named after a French colonial fort on the banks of the Wabash River.

The jajabara had well and truly begun.

Jajabara in the US of A (Part I: Of Brownies, Borrowed Confidence and the Mother Road)

There is a particular kind of restlessness that hits you about a month before a long trip. Not anxiety. Not excitement exactly. Something in between — a low hum that gets louder the more you look at maps. I know this feeling well. It is the wanderlust arriving, right on schedule.

The occasion was CIES 2025, an academic conference in Chicago. A work trip, officially. But it was also close to a month long, loosely planned, and the US of A was at the other end of it. I had been here before — 2013, to be precise. And 2013 had left behind one solid regret.

I had chickened out.

Many would say that is quite non-typical of me. A senior partner at Accenture US had offered a fully sponsored, exciting business development trip along the famous west coast. California. The Pacific. Route 1 perhaps. And I said no. I don't fully remember why. But the regret, I remember very well.

So when Chicago came calling in 2025, I made a quiet decision. This time, I would make up for it. And some more.

---

A few things were decided early. The conference was in Chicago. I had friends and family to visit. I had to fly out of New York at the end. Everything in between — rest, I said, we'll figure out. A road trip or two across the heart of America. I romanticised about Route 66, explored the idea of the West Coast, and finally decided to head east from Chicago. The research only deepened the wanderlust. I downloaded maps from the Road Trip USA website. I applied for an international driving licence. I was going to drive in America.

My family had no idea.

My wife would have thrown a fit and threatened with everything she had to forbid me. 

---

Chicago received me at the historic Palmer House Hotel — 1641 rooms, one of the largest hotels in North America, and a history as layered as its lobby ceiling. It was here that Bertha Palmer invented the brownie. Yes, the brownie — that most beloved of baked goods — was born in this hotel, conjured up by the wife of Potter Palmer, who had gifted her this very hotel as an engagement present. Shah Jahan, you are not alone.

My friend Soumya Ranjan drove down from his home to downtown Chicago and we stayed together in the last day of the conference. And it was Soumya who, knowingly or unknowingly, would go on to play the most important role in this adventure — not as a companion on the road, but as the man who gave me the confidence to drive on it.

But first, the Art Institute of Chicago. We visited it together, that magnificent building that stands at the very spot where Swami Vivekananda addressed the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, on the sidelines of the World Fair. A moment of history quietly folded into an afternoon of art.

---

From Chicago, I headed south with Soumya to his home in Normal, IL, where his lovely family — two children and an amazingly warm wife — waited. She cooked Odia food for me. In Illinois. In America. Some things about Odia hospitality, I have decided, are simply immune to geography.

Over three days, Soumya let me drive. His Honda. On American roads. Left-hand drive, right-hand traffic — everything my hands and instincts had been trained against for decades. We made small trips — the supermarket, restaurants, a local brewery, the Rent-A-Car store. Each trip a little longer, a little more confident. Soumya guided me on the said and unsaid rules of American roads with the patience of a man who understood exactly what was at stake and the calm of someone who pretended he didn't.

By the time we walked into the Rent-A-Car store that evening, I was ready. We got a Nissan Altima. Available. Practical. Unassuming. Perfect.

---

The morning of departure, I gave myself one hour to pack. This is a ritual I trust — an hour of packing gives me the illusion, and sometimes the reality, of organisation. Before I left, I gifted Soumya a scarf of mine. Kissed his children goodbye. Stepped out into the fine Normal, IL morning.

Adventure and excitement were in my eyes. I know this because I could feel them there.

The Nissan Altima and I pulled out of Soumya's driveway and pointed ourselves south, toward the Mother Road. Route 66. And the first stop — Lincoln, IL. The only city named after Abraham Lincoln before he became president, christened by the man himself, legend has it, with the juice of a watermelon.

America, I was coming. Again. This time, I wasn't chickening out.

Are we in a state of emergency as a society?

S and I often respond with a pause to a certain sound & sight on the roads of Delhi or elsewhere. The sound of the siren and the flashing lights of an ambulance. S immediately says a silent prayer sending wishes towards the person concerned. My first reaction as a driver is usually of attention and looking at my mirror(s) to ascertain the exact position of the ambulance. I must admit the siren does achieve the purpose it was meant to have been their in the first place - get the attention of the other drivers on the road and get them to make way for the ambulance. 

I find now that I get too distracted, disturbed and almost irritated by the sound of the ambulance and the sight of the flashing lights around me. It is primarily because of the way I see other fellow drivers and traffic respond to the presence of the ambulance on the road - indifference or worse, opportunity. The noise persists for quite some time and one feels that one is in that state of alertness for prolonged period while trying to concentrate on driving. 

I have seen ambulances struggle to find a way to navigate their way along the traffic lanes which sadly no one follows in our cities. They struggle to speed past other vehicles to save the precious seconds and minutes called the "golden hour" and reach the hospital where the paramedics and doctors can try to save the life of the patient. It's really sad to see them stuck with you and one can't help but think of the contrast. While most people on the road are on they way to their everyday jobs, or some errand or even a leisurely visit to friends and family, it is truly a matter of life and death for the person in the ambulance and his/her family. 

What appalls me to see sometimes is the stubborn refusal to acknowledge this situation of the "other" person and try to do the basic minimum - make way ! Put your indicators and move to another lane. I have seen the ambulance drivers struggle to move across the lanes to find the slightest scope of moving ahead of other cars and swivel in a zig-zag manner. It should be the other way around. We should make way for the ambulance. It is truly a wonder that we don't force these ambulances to cause more accidents on road. 

If at all the ambulance finds a way to go past others or a traffic signal, one also witnesses the most opportunistic behaviour which some drivers - cars and bikers alike, tag right behind the ambulance to speed ahead of the traffic. I don't feel envious of them because these guys got to go to wherever they were planning to go and do whatever they wanted to do. I feel bad and almost sad at the state of affairs as a society. Where is the sense of any empathy or sympathy ? What about common sense? How can we be so blinded by our own sense of importance of our life, activities and priorities that we ignore this.    

AI my Brain !!

I must confess here, I am (still!) one of the nay-sayers of AI and self-styled Don Quixote who with his pen and penchant for nature wishes to ride towards the windmills of data-centres that power AI and big tech and claim a chivalrous, romantic fight (or flight). 

I have, on certain occasions, used AI to correct, edit what I write and generate some images for me. I might learn some new AI tools as I see my colleagues use them and finish the work that used to take us a few days or weeks in minutes. However, my Quixotic refusal to get swayed away by AI as the panacea for all troubles, including the even more quixotic claims that they can solve some of the most pressing global problems such as hunger, extreme poverty and climate change puts me in a small minority. 

In particular, when it comes to my own sector, education and learning of young children, I am not too sure if it’s helping or hindering or transforming the already fragile process of learning! Sometime back I wrote and presented a paper on how digital technologies (including AI) are needed for an outcome-oriented education system, where I discussed their need and use-cases (a favorite term of all tech-enthusiasts!) for at least four areas - tech4governance, tech4teaching, tech4assessments and tech4learning. I stand by my view that the potential of technology is largely under-utilised in our country and it could certainly improve things. I see tons and tons of data collected on paper (registers, forms), (whatever sounds big) bytes and bytes of data collected but scarcely used well. We can keep blaming capacity, capability, scale or anything till the cows come back home but, the problem is we invest huge sums of money and thousands of hours of human effort to collect & store the data - it’s comes at an opportunity cost, of spending that in teaching-learning process for teachers & school leaders. If AI, new digital technologies can solve that: I will be a big cheerleader and welcome the same. 

But, when it comes to the process of young minds interacting with technology without, I have some discomfort with that. Mostly for three reasons,

1. Most of these products are designed in a way that they are addictive 

2. The child does not have the full understanding of the nature of the engagement, pros-cons and consequences of the engagement with the product/technology 

3. Even we do not know the adverse impacts fully well or we do not know them yet 

I will share some news and briefs that I came across recently about all these three concerns. 

Recently, there was a case in an US court where the parents of a child sued the company meta saying that their daughter was using the app(s) for 16+ hours a day. While meta argued (as one can imagine) that there is a consent, age etc. etc. one of the major reasons that the parents cited was that the algorithms and product were designed in a manner that they increase the engagement time almost to the point of addiction. All of us know this from personal experience too. Take a look at your screen time data and it reflects nothing but helpless succumbing to a habit of doomscrolling, digital engagement, notifications and alerts. The courts actually gave a verdict in favour of the family. 

Children are different from adults. Hence, while sale of cigarettes, tobacco, alcohol etc. is allowed after a certain age, they are prohibited for children. I am not comparing these “substances” with technology which has many wonderful uses but I am making the case for guided supervision and use. 

Finally, even medical science is realising through evidence and data the impact of recent technologies such as AI on our mind. Particularly on our memory and other cognitive functions. In many ways, AI uses some of the key characteristics of our brain against the brain itself. We are creatures of habit and our brains love grooves of patterns so that we take less and less effort to do something. So, making a good prompt for AI and getting the answer will almost be natural after repeated use. It could do the long-boring stuff, it could do the hard-stuff, it could do the creative stuff and it could talk and almost impersonate a human. So why not! 

Well, all of it comes at cost, more than just the subscription fees we pay. It’s our own mind and us. We have all been listening to how in social media and other platforms, the product is our time, and our attention, which is milked by the big tech companies. Similarly, the more and more we share prompts, feed data, “train the models” - the AI will get smarter, which could be good but the risk is are we getting dumber? 

Any muscle not used gets weaker and weaker, the same is true of mind and even more so. Like Short to long-term memory loss and even dementia. 

Many researchers believe that to be the case, calling it almost a “cognitive surrender”. Please check this out. 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260417-ai-chatbots-could-be-making-you-stupider

Finally to end this, sharing a small real incident. The other day I was on a call with one of my colleagues, when I heard his young son, all of two come and make some demand or complaint. I was keen to know what the commotion was all about. My colleague explained that apparently the ipad that he was using wasn’t working and his way of explaining the situation was “ mera dimaag kharap ho gaya!”. (brain isn’t working) My colleague then added, that his son refers to laptops, ipads as “dimaag” !

Take that in ! 

Data for Democracy

We shall delve into the matter of collection, storage and use of data or information in a democratic manner or in a democratic society. We shall limit that into data in the world of school education and the development sector. 

I was reading a book by Yuval Noah Harrari where he refers to certain fundamental principles of democracies that must be respected and followed in the digital age for democracies to survive and flourish! Even a small ray of optimism in these trying times is welcome.

I could not find the source of these principles, and even Yuval refers to them as universal, open, known for millenia kind of principles. He articulates these simple and almost spiritual sounding principles and juxtaposes them against AI (what else you expect in these times in a book called Nexus!). He details how these principles must be honoured and offers a few solutions as well.  

Now, let’s talk about them in the context of school education in general and that of India in particular.  

Benovolence: The first principle has to be that the data or information, so painstakingly collected, managed, analysed, visualised and presented has to help the person from (or about) whom the data is being collected. Yuval gives a simple example of our physician collecting information from us with the primary motive of healing us. Schools are almost invariably the primary source of all data that we later see analysed and presented at different levels related to access and quality of school education. School information systems such as the U-DISE+ collect information on almost all aspects of schools - enrollment, teachers, physical resources, funds and other details. The principle of benevolence is met only when the information collected is not just for reporting and statistical publication but also as a planning and resourcing tool. So, when use of U-DISE data was mandated for SSA, RMSA and later SmSA planning and budgeting exercise, the schools understood that reporting of accurate data ensures that  adequate resources in form of additional classrooms, toilets, drinking water facility, boundary walls, labs, assistive devices for CwSN etc. could be provisioned for the school subject to availability of budget. While the planning, budgeting and resourcing is a long process from school to block to district and further to state and centre, it starts from the schools providing timely and accurate data with an expectation that it will benefit from the process.  

Extending the argument to learning data, we must keep this in mind that all information collected on learning of children must come back to benefit & help the child ultimately! 

Decentalisation: There is a great temptation of centralised systems and structures. The design is usually neat, efficient, has to be understood once, allows for control and correction at one place etc. The cons predictably are extreme dependence on the central system and architecture and privacy concerns. But, the larger concern is that of the central system being the only source of data or truth and then it being subject to manipulation. No information system is infallible and each would have its own incentives and disincentives to report data in a way that suits their narrative. 

I loved this line “for the survival of democracy, some inefficiency is a feature, not a bug”. Having multiple databases and information channels (government, courts, media, academia, private, NGOs) are essential to have self-correcting mechanisms where they balance each other out and act as almost fact-checks. 

Starting from a child, who often asks his elder sibling to sign the report card if not happy with the results to private schools and their ways of reporting fees and expenses to the government schools, under and over-reporting resources and performance respectively, each have their own reasons to report data that suits them. Hence, multiple reporting of the same data, say learning levels of children is not a bad thing! We must welcome government, private and community assessing and reporting data about their children. 

Mutuality or mutual accountability: This principle is easy to understand but hard to implement in the hierarchical world that we live in. Put simply, there should be flow of information both ways and not just bottom to top. Accountability, similarly, should also be a two way street. 

In our context, if a school has provided information on the number of children accurately it has the right to demand that the basic entitlements such as textbooks, uniforms and mid-day-meals it receives are adequate and timely. 

To extend this to learning, the “long route of accountability” that RISE study refers to starts with the citizen electing a government and holding them accountable for quality education of their children, the government then has an extensive system of ministry, education department and frontline workers such as teachers who are engaged by the government to ensure this promise of learning is met back to the parent-citizen. 

Change and rest: Yuval goes on to articulate that any  democratic data system or government for that matter should allow both - the opportunity to change and the option of rest. He elucidates the necessity of the first concept by taking an example of a system that doesn’t allow humans the option to change by any means - of action or opportunity such as the Hindu caste system. While several hundred years ago, the caste system was tightly coupled to the occupation and was even more binding, even today, the caste of the Hindu person can not change. Any democratic society must allow the citizens the opportunity to change and for that provide data, information and if needed, appropriate resources to do so. That is the basis of the social and political contract that defines a democratic rule.

At the other end of the spectrum, there have been sovereigns and heads of government that consider their citizens as mere clay toys that they can mould and change as they wish and as many times as they wish. Such absolute denial of the agency of the individual and participation has been met with strong individual and collective protest leading to violent revolutions across geographies and at different points of time in history. 

There has to be a balance between the amount of data and information needed for the basic (and the first here) principle of benevolence which the state and the citizen agree using principles of mutuality (second principle here) to bring about the desired change. Democracies and systems evolve and there might be a need to change the existing norms and practices but yet again the same principles should be applied. 

There is another beautiful line from the book that would sum this write up and my feelings “human life is a balance act between endeavouring to improve ourselves and accepting who we are”.