I have been reading and indeed writing far too many obituaries recently.
I learnt a few weeks ago that the great human rights campaigner, Swami Agnivesh. had died.
At breakfast this morning I devoured an excellent obituary of him in The Economist.
Perhaps only subscribers can see the above piece but here, on fair use principles, is the sentence that made me gulp my coffee:
In that role of peacemaker, he also trekked in 2011 into the forests of Chhattisgarh to oversee the handover by Maoist rebels of five abducted policemen.
Janie and I were in Chhattisgarh in February that year. Intrigued, I Googled the incident to see if, as I suspected, it occurred when we were there and near where we were.
Here is a link to the contemporaneous article from The Hindu.
So, the hostages were taken on 25 January 2011 and a hostage crisis started to unfold in Narayanpur on 3 February when demands were made by the Maoists and interventions planned by Agnivesh and others.
Janie and I were due to visit Narayanpur for market day on 6 February, but our host, Jolly, assured us that it would not be a good idea to go there and said he had revised our itinerary to see equally or even more interesting tribal people and markets nearer to Bastar.
With the time saved, we ended up in Jagdalpur with me providing live commentary for the Interstate Cricket Match, which yielded one of my favourite memories/anecdotes for the King Cricket website...
…and also one of the most memorable travel days Janie and I (aka Daisy and Ged; that too is a long story)…have ever had. Here is the write up of the whole day:
Of course, we had been warned before we travelled to Chhattisgarh that it was a politically volatile place and that our itinerary might be subject to last minute change.
But what a wonderful day we had on the back of that change.
And how extraordinary to learn, after nearly 10 years, that the reason for that change was a hostage crisis that was being resolved by one of our human rights heros in the place we were supposed to visit.
We can’t (in practical terms) travel at the moment, during the pandemic, but Janie and I were all-but transported, through time and space, back to that 2011 adventure of ours in the central plains of India. Invigorating, it was.