jamshedpur: steel, sweat, and rivers that don’t care about your plans
alright, so i’m currently sitting in what might be the world’s stickiest plastic chair at some roadside dhaba near the kharkai river, and let me tell you - jamshedpur doesn’t apologize for being exactly what it is. i just checked and it's 17.6°C with 35% humidity right now, hope you like that kind of thing.
the air smells like diesel and wet earth, which somehow works. someone told me that the dalma hills look like sleeping elephants covered in moss, but all i see from here are smokestacks playing peek-a-boo through the haze.
this place was literally built because jamsetji tata went ‘ah yes, coal and rivers, very sexy’ in 1907. now it’s all blast furnaces and forests pretending not to hate each other. the dirt here knows it’s sitting on iron ore and uranium deposits - you can taste it in the water.
if you get bored, midnapur or purulia are just a short drive away, though why you’d leave the land where temperatures swing from ‘oh god why’ (45°C) to ‘pleasant sweater weather’ (8°C) is beyond me. someone at the chai stall whispered that the real local dish is whatever dust settles on your paratha from the steel plants - haven’t confirmed yet.
it’s got that beautiful post-industrial limbo where nature’s trying to swallow factories whole. 30% forest cover they say. 100% ‘we make steel and also butterflies, fight us’ energy.
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