Jharkhand (Part 2)

It must have been a while since I wrote 2 posts on consecutive days! Here is part 2 of my Jamshedpur trip highlights.

We went to Bistupur main road a couple of times. This is the Brigade Road of Jamshedpur. Pretty neat.

We were looking for a vegetarian restaurant and were directed to one on Bistupur main road (where else?). This happened to be the place known for South Indian food. However, the restaurant seemed to be run by a North Indian, hence we decided to do what I have learnt over the years: Eat the local food. By the time we got rotis and subji on our table, we looked around the hall and saw everyone... I mean literally every single customer in the restaurant... including the locals, sardars, huge families... was eating dosa. Wow, I am sure the restaurant staff were laughing their guts out because we ordered rotis in that restaurant. We too quickly corrected ourselves and switched to a dosa.

Oh, by the way, we were in Jamshedpur because we were visiting NIT Jamshedpur. It seemed like any other NIT that I have visited. Pretty good facilities, pretty good students, good experience. What surprised me was how far from the main road was this place. It seemed to be connected to the main road by narrow and bad roads. This being a pretty old institution, I am not sure why they did not build it closer to the main roads or provided wide enough roads. I suspect the roads were wide, but were encroached upon over the years.

On the day we were leaving Jharkhand, our train was at 6:15AM. When we came out of the hotel at 5:30, we were surprised to see the amount of sunlight. We had gone more northwards and eastwards from Bangalore and it was the summer in Northern hemisphere, so I was expecting early sunrise. However, I was surprised to see the number of people already on the road. The town seemed to be more active at 5:30 than Bangalore is at 7AM.

Our return journey was in a train, so we were not going to experience the roads again. A couple of things in the train reminded us again about the amount of impact naxals have in this area. As we entered our coach, we saw a commando - in full gear with a machine gun, strolling in it. Later, as the train passed through a certain area, they closed and locked all doors from inside and pulled down all the window shutters. Wow!

After watching more paddy fields, we were back in Kolkata.