Travel

We traveled by train from Bangalore to Mysore, a journey that took around two hours. Boarding the Chennai-Mysore Vande Bharat Express from SBC/KSR (Bangalore City) Railway Station, I had a pleasant first-time experience on this train. Though it ran at an average speed of 100 km/h, I expected it to go faster. However, I later learned that there are speed limits for the Vande Bharat Express. On the Delhi-Bhopal route, it runs at a maximum speed of 160 km/h, while on other routes, it travels at speeds ranging from 110 to 130 km/h.

Santiniketan is a place that never gets old. I went there for the first time in 2017 and again in March 2021, I made my second trip to the land established by Debendranath Tagore, father of the Rabindranath Tagore, and where Gurudev Rabindranath founded his dream project – the Visva-Bharati University. It was his father who had come to Bolpur and built a guest house and named it Santiniketan. Gradually the name was used to denote the entire area. In 1901, the visionary man, Rabindranath Tagore, came here and settled down. He then started a school for children, Brahmacharyaashrama, which is now known as Patha Bhavan. It expanded and finally grew into Visva-Bharati University in 1921.

After seven long years, I went to Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, a state in Northern India, along with my parents and some of my relatives from Kolkata. It is a city, located along the banks of the Rapti River and is near the India-Nepal border, wherein two of my uncles and one of my aunts live. It is the birthplace of the Gita press – India’s oldest and largest printing press, and it has the longest railway platform in the world.