The charm of the railways is unmistakable. But it was a nondescript railway junction that made journalist, Bishwanath Ghosh literally change tracks. The writer in Ghosh was inspired by life in these railway junctions as he went on to write about them in his maiden travel book – ” Chai Chai – Travels in Places where you stop but never get off.” CLAY spoke to the Chennai based author and here is his take on travel writing .
1.What got you to write a travel book ?
I decided to write the book about two years ago. I was travelling from Kanpur to Chennai, returning from my annual Diwali trip to home. The train had stopped at Itarsi station. Itarsi is a big junction. I was having tea at the platform and during the nearly 10 minutes that I spent at the platform, I heard names of stations from virtually every corner of India being mentioned. It suddenly struck me, “People all parts of the country pass through this place, so many cultures criss-cross this station, and yet I know nothing about Itarsi except that it is a railway junction. What lies outside the railway station? Who all live there? What do they do?” Subsequently, the publishers approached me to write a travel book. They wanted something different. So I chose seven junctions that people invariably pass through during train journeys but where they never get off. I made these junctions my destination and that’s how the book came about. I started with Mughal Sarai, came to Jhansi, then Itarsi. Moving down south, I covered Guntakal, Arakkonam, Jolarpettai and Shoranur.
2. It’s not often that people choose their first book to be about nondescript places which hardly features on any tourist maps…
Mine is a travel book and not a guidebook for tourists. It is a study of your own backyard, which you take for granted to the extent of ignoring it. But these are places, the small towns and the villages, where the real India lives. My book satisfies my own curiosity, and perhaps the curiosity of hundreds of others, about what lies outside the yard of these railway stations.
3. As a traveller, what catches your attention about a place?
Anonymity. Anonymity leads to curiosity, and curiosity makes you travel and discover.
4. The book is full of sights and sounds of a destination and anecdotes. Is there a specific sight or a sound that still remains with you.
The bustling markets in the evenings – people shopping for groceries, chaatwallahs doing brisk business, small-time bars full of people, men loitering around in paan shops or chaurahas. No one is ever in a hurry, they have all the time in the word. That’s the life we left behind 20 or 30 years ago.
5. What is your take on travel writing today?
Travel writing is yet to evolve, in the sense we still have a Paul Theroux giving us his take on India. But on the tourist-writing front, yes, Indians are discovering a lot of off-the-beaten-track places, which is heartening. Just about 10 years ago, no one was making such discoveries.
6. “Real India” today as it is portrayed seems to have become ironically a perspective of the foreigners only. Do you feel your book has broken that mould?
In a sense, yes. Because if you look up the internet, you will hardly find any information about a place like Mughal Sarai. But now you have a book that has an entire chapter devoted to Mughal Sarai. And the book has not been written by a foreigner, but an Indian.
7. What is your take on more opportunities to aspiring travel writers today?
The idea is not to be blind to your own backyard just because you live there. Questions need to be asked all the time: how did your backyard come into being, why is it the way it is today, what it means to other people, and so on. A traveller and a tourist are two different people. A tourist usually looks for a bed of grass to walk on, while for a traveller it can often be a bed of thorns.
