Gorakhpur, India : ICYEP first day

A city famous for its massive train networks throughout the country, Gorakhpur, lies in Uttar Pradesh state of India and is one of the closest train platform from Nepal border.

A 3 hour bus ride from Sonauli (Nepal-India border) via a UP state-government bus and then you reach Gorakhpur train station. We reached to Sonauli early morning at 6 am. After a little of fresh-up and light breakfast we headed towards to cross the border. In contrast to our imagination, we cleared the border very easily. We  talked to officials in a polite manner and showed the evidence that we were to attend a program in India. And thus no hassle :)

Then we catched a UP state-government bus from Sonauli to Gorakhpur , a distance of around 3 hours for just IC 92. ( saved  from exp. tickets of private bus operators). The landscape is almost same to the plains of Nepal so we didn't had much to enjoy from the scenes .  As we had train to Mumbai in the evening, we visited the famous Gorakhnath temple in Gorakhpur and stayed there the whole afternoon. Apart  from the rest of the city, the temple seemed to be well-managed and looked after.

In the evening we reached to Train station which was to be our major transportation means for the rest of our stay in India. As many of us hadn't seen train previously , some of my friends were excited to see train passing after every few minutes.  We tried to find out how train system worked ( Indian railway is also features in HBS case study and is one of the largest employment provider in the world) .Frankly speaking , the train system in Gorakhpur  was not properly managed and seemed troublesome. We didn't know about different train jargons like : wait list, tatkal, SL class, ac-tier, train number, etc. We tried to take help from railway police, but to no avail. Finally by asking to other commoners we were able to locate our train at 9 pm  and the journey to Mumbai began.

Exhausted  for the whole day because of psychological pressure  to understand train-system( with objective to not miss the train) , we took our SL class berth and soon fell asleep ( or at-least pretended so as it was our first night in train, sound sleep was difficult ). We were witnessing the backbone of development of India and the basic means of transport in the live of billion of Indian commoners.