The Dream

It's a beautiful winter morning of 2020 A.D. I am checking my e-mails as usual and am surprised to receive a mail from Jay Smith, one of my old time friends. Actually, his name is (was) Jaydeep Panchal. He was with me as a student in Chicago in the year 1991-92. Once a die-hard "Indian" who changed his name from 'Jaydeep' to 'Jay' and last name from 'Panchal' to 'Smith' as Panchals are traditionally Blacksmiths in India. (No comments there!)

Anyways, this time he got in touch with me after a while, after almost 10 years. In his mail, he requested me to arrange a one-day trip to Ambaji as he had to complete a 'badha' there. I arranged the same, and waited eagerly for the other fine winter morning when he arrived at the Amdavad airport.

The airport was full of the traditional migratory birds - the so-called NRIs - that generally arrive in India during this season. Well, there was one another lot of people gathered at the airport - the RNIs - (i.e. Resident Non-Indians). This funny lot of people thinks that, culturally, they have accidentally ended up in Navrangpura instead of in New York. And there are indeed a lot of them across India now days. They were all there at the airport to greet their compatriots.

I recognized Jaydeep from his Dev Anand style stroll. He was astonished to see the Amdavad airport, which is considered as one of the most "attractive" structures in world, thanks to a few graduates from the decades old School of Architecture stationed locally. The cleanliness of the vicinity also impressed him. But, he was more anxious to see my Solar power operated car in which we were going to travel to Ambaji. He said he has heard a lot about the success of these cars in India and was dejected with the fact that he could not use one of them in the U.S. as they do not have enough sunlight there. Effective utilization of solar energy has been the biggest achievement of Indian scientists in recent times. It is one of the gifts of the technological revolution, which has put India far ahead of all the other developed nations of the world.

We started for Ambaji. The 120 km long expressway was going to take about only an hour or so therefore we had enough time. Consequently, we stopped at Idar, a small town on the way, as Jaydeep wanted to have a glimpse of the rural India. So, we took an exit ahead of the town and went directly to a small but shipshape domicile located near to the freeway. It was a house of a farmer - Joitabhai - whose small agro-product processing plant was located in the same premise. We asked him whether we could come in and have a word with him. More than willingly, he called us in and told us to wait for a few minutes. He had to supervise the export consignment of the processed vegetables, which was to be shipped to Brazil.

Jaydeep was inquisitive, as he knew that there are many farmers in India who process their produce, themselves, and ship the end product to all across the globe. However, witnessing an actual operative plant was of his long time yearning. That was because during last 10-15 odd years, India had registered more than 10,000 international patents in the field of agro-processing technology, which was his vocational subject.

As per the centuries old tradition of "atithi devo bhav:", Joitabhai offered us refreshments and certainly, the Gujarati "cha" with lots of Sugar! Jaydeep also was a little surprised by the swiftness with which Joitabhai was processing the export documentation on the net while spending time with us. He came to know from Joitabhai that almost all the farmers in North Gujarat have some sort of processing plant in which they process their own produce and make an end product, which is exported. So they all had to be capable of processing the shipping documents on the net.

We left Idar and reached Ambaji. The temple trust there has made arrangement of Valet Parking. As we entered the temple I heard the 'pujari's mobile ring tone. Everyone said - "that's the message from the GOD". Baffled, I rushed to the 'pujari'. Suddenly, that 'pujari' turned and said, - "Wake up, before it’s too late!" - He was Dr. Kalam.