Day 2 - Boarding the Jagriti train

The girl in the picture is from Deoria in Uttar Pradesh, a mid-income state in the north east of India, bordering Nepal. She is rallying the 450 passengers about to embark on this journey with her simple, unbounded enthusiasm

As the clock approached midnight on Christmas eve, we boarded the train. And here I sit in my sleeper berth on Christmas day finally taking in a quiet moment.

I spoke to someone who, after much thoughtful examination and contemplation, has decided to take on a 5 year project to prove a scalable model to turn barren lands into productive and profitable farmland. Profitable for the farmer that is. Now that's harder than it sounds.

What's particularly intriguing is that the project happens to be funded by one of India's biggest conglomerates and led by one of the world's richest men, a shrewd capitalist. Worth investigating..

The other interesting conversation was with Amit, a new grad from a village in Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital. Here was a brave young man who had the courage to stand up to his family for the sake of his passion, which lay not in engineering as he had been pushed into but in public service, administration in particular. Government bureaucrats are perceived as the bad guys in India, especially by the youth. I asked him "aren't you afraid of the bureaucracy and corruption?" His answer was an unflinching "no". He wanted to change the system from the inside. He was well aware of the evils, but had chosen to focus on being the change he wanted to bring.