The India Map

While chatting with one of my friends I was suddenly reminded of this India map which was in our house during my childhood days.

I think I was probably in the the 2nd or 3rd grade. We were in Nagpur then. Appa had just become a sports coach- specialising in Handball. Appa bought a huge India map and we neatly pasted it on the back of the bedroom door. It had everything we would require for our studies - states, capitals, union territories, cities, regions, roads, rail routes, rivers & oceans, distances etc etc. Helped us in history, geography, civics and current affairs. Like its Google now, almost every query on India would lead me to the map. Especially on Sundays would spends hours trying to study it. At different times of the year the reason of interest would be different. During tests & exams it would be study related, sometime in March it would be the route our train will take to reach Chennai, Coimbatore and ultimately Udumalpet (a small town in Coimbatore district in Tamilnadu) etc etc. From the day I could remember appa would travel to places near and far...defence bases...army, navy and of course air force. Once the map was up, one day appa started marking all the routes he had taken till date as a part of his official and personal travel, using a red sketch pen. Over the next week or so, about 40-50% of the map had red lines going in various directions. Then on any new route he took was updated on the map with a lot of enthusiasm & urgency. Most of them would be an extension of the already travelled routes but some were also new ones.

One day I realised this huge map of India had red lines criss-crossing in all directions covering all cities where you had rail routes or roads to...big and small. That day I was happy and surprised. Happy as if a major task was achieved and surprised at the amount of travel appa had done within say a decade. Envious too...as I still have memories connected to some trips of his...sunrise at Darjeeling, an explosion at Vizag, sand dunes of Jaisalmer and the rock gardens of Chandigarh.

Within about 4 years of buying the map, all of a sudden it seemed useless. In 1988, appa was transferred to Kharagpur, in West Bengal. We packed our bags and moved leaving the map behind....