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Mumbai is voting. Across a basketball court inside an "international" school turned polling station in the posh Cuffe Parade area, turnout is a steady trickle. On a notice board outside, the school promises "piped music, air-conditioned classrooms, biometric attendance and wireless internet", among other things, to its students.

Unsurprisingly, the school is in one of the city's smartest neighbourhoods and part of the south Mumbai constituency, infamous for its apathy to politics. Turnout in this constituency has barely touched 30% in previous elections.

I bump into Shilpa Khandelwal, a young clothes designer. She has just cast her ballot at a polling booth at the school. The booths are examples of modest Indian ingenuity: small cubbyholes are partitioned and covered by white cloth and held together by bamboo near the school's hard basketball court.

Ms Khandelwal talks briskly, exuding a confident air. "You know what, the rich and upper middle classes have made a mistake by staying away from politics here," she tells me.

"Politicians are only looking at slums in this debauched voting system," she says with a hint of anger in her voice.

So she has decided to rectify the mistake by casting her ballot this time. It helped that she attended a talk recently about the virtues of the vote; it helped her to understand why ballots can make a difference, "however small".

"I don't remember the person who gave us the talk. But he told us how important it is to vote. We can influence and change a lot of things, even in a small way, by voting" she smiled.

Ms Khandelwal hopes that this time residents of south Mumbai - where last November's bloody attacks took place - will wake up and vote in large numbers. It's three hours into the voting, and she feels that turnout still looks a tad thin.

"For me," she says, "the issues are of good governance, improved security, infrastructure, education". I ask her whether she has a regular supply of drinking water and electricity.

"Oh, all that is fine here."

On the other side of the basketball court, the poor and the hoi polloi of the area vote. They live and work on the margins of this constituency. Shaila Kara Naqvi is waiting for her husband, who owns a small shop selling electrical goods. He is voting inside. She says civic amenities are shabby where she stays. "We have lot of problems with water and electricity. Water just comes on the tap for one hour every day."

On two sides of the basketball court, in the same polling station in one of the country's richest constituencies, India's class divide is stark. On one side, the rich and successful walk in holiday wear to cast their vote and exchange merry banter. Across the court, tired-looking men and women in frayed shirts, saris, kurtas and a lone Muslim in a fez cap queue up to vote. There is almost an unconscious acquiescence in this social segregation.

Three hours into the voting here, and 10% of the ballots have been cast, a polling official tells me. It's still a long day ahead, so polling may well pick up. There are 20 candidates in the fray here - nine of them are independent ones, including a leading woman banker who has taken a sabbatical from her job to run.

I take my leave and hit the Mumbai roads. I pass small queues of voters outside polling stations, a movie hall showing a film called My Mom's Latest Boyfriend, a huge billboard for a hotel saying "Beauty is skin deep" and yet another gem of an English language tutorial poster which says, "Speak English like James Bond!" I am on the way to Palli Hill, a leafy hilltop neighbourhood where many of the Bollywood stars live. A colleague tells me one of the stars is planning to vote soon.

Speculation is rife among the journalists waiting outside a school in Palli Hill when I arrive there. One voter reports having seen a superstar of yesteryear casting his ballot. Another excitedly adds that a famous lyricist has also been seen. Photographers excitedly click pictures of a middle aged man helping an ailing man inside the polling station. When I ask whether one or both of the men are stars or actors, one of them says, "I don't know. I just took no chances".

A hefty man in a black tee-shirt is walking down a steep decline which leads to the school. His tee-shirt says "I bullshit when I'm pissed". He says he is 62 years old and this is the first time he is turning out to vote in his life. Why now? I ask of the Palli Hill voter.

"I used to be in and out of the country a lot. Hah. People here thought I was a Pakistani!"

The man is aware that his tee-shirt is attracting a lot of attention. "Hah," he says triumphantly. "All these years the politicians bullshitted us. Now we are about to bullshit them! Hah!"

A few kilometres away from the fun and gaiety of Palli Hill, polling is serious business in a prison-like municipal school in the Khar area. The area, my friends here say, is a combustible mix of out-of-town migrants and local Marathis living in orderly cardboard and tin boxes along the pavement.

There is a rush of voters at the door of the school building. Women giggle when I ask them questions in Hindi. My friend here who speaks Marathi takes over. They tell her stories of trudging miles to fetch drinking water, and how their shanties are being demolished to make way for high-rises. Here, polling officials say nearly 20% of the voters have already voted within five hours of polling on a hot and sultry morning. For the poor of Mumbai, the vote still holds out the promise of better times. Dreams die hard in this city of dreams.

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Will Mumbai's voters surprise India? That is the question the morning papers here are posing as polls opened early this morning. They are imploring, goading and hectoring people to cast their ballots. Half of Mumbai residents have traditionally stayed away from the vote.

"This is your V-Day, Mumbai," says . Then it begins worrying: "In Mumbai, a city known for its low turnout," the paper says, "the big question is: will enough people brave a sweltering summer day and queue up to vote". An editorial in the same paper wonders whether many residents have already left for a short vacation, as the next three days are holidays.

exhorts the reader: "If you are worried about the slowdown and its effect on your future, if you were furious with the way 26/11 [Mumbai attacks] was handled, this is the time to pick the people you want to manage your nation." I have not seen fervent appeals of this kind in any other city in India. Will Mumbai listen? I plan to find out later today.

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The view from Delhi is often blinkered. Pundits in India's capital smugly pontificate on the country's politics and the direction it is taking. Delhi is a bully pulpit for its politicians, journalists, NGOs and commentators alike; they tell us what is good and bad for the rest of the country. Very often, it makes for dodgy perception. Delhi's take on India also leads to a lot of myth making, not unusual in a complex society like India.

I am reminded of this again when I go visiting Kumar Ketkar, Mumbai's most respected journalist. Mr Ketkar edits a mass circulation Marathi newspaper and is a scholar. He sits in a small office in the shadow of the looming Oberoi hotel towers on the seafront. The hotel was one of the places targeted during last November's attacks.

It is early evening and Mr Ketkar's newsroom is buzzing with activity. Polls are a little more than a day away, and the editor is bemused by some of the reports emanating from Delhi. Maharashtra - of which Mumbai is the capital - is a politically important state; it sends 48 MPs to parliament.

Still, as Mr Ketkar says, the national (that is, Delhi) media is obsessed by Mumbai. It is speculating that a Maharashtra leader who also runs India's cricket is a dark horse prime ministerial candidate. It is overflowing with stories on how the young in Mumbai are "rocking the vote" because they feel insecure after last November's attacks.

"Sometimes it feels like Maharashtra doesn't exist beyond Mumbai," says Mr Ketkar, grinning. "Mumbai just dominates the perceptions about Maharashtra, it overshadows Maharashtra."

It's a compelling thought. No other city in India, I agree, dominates a state so much. It is the country's financial capital and home to one of the world's busiest film industries, its best-known, best-selling English pulp writer and many such "beautiful people", as India's media lovingly call them. The only city which comes close is Delhi. But the self-obsessed capital is only a boring city state.

It's time for Mr Ketkar to burst some myths. We begin with last November's attacks and how it will affect polling on Thursday.

"Not a soul is bothered about the November attacks outside Mumbai. Even in parts of Mumbai it is not an issue. I'd even say that outside south Mumbai (the posh part of the city where the attacks took place) it is not much of an election issue at all," the genial editor says.

Mr Ketkar says that if the governing Congress party loses the vote in Maharashtra, it will be despite the November attacks. A few years ago, floods killed more than 600 people in Mumbai. People drowned in the filthy rising waters, and suffocated inside their stranded cars. Relatively rich farmers have taken their lives by the hundred - battered by debt, failed crops and low prices. But in the dystopic world of breaking news, only the last big story matters.

Ordinary people I talk to here bemoan the "complete non-performance" of the lacklustre Congress party here for the past 10 years. "It is a lost decade for Maharashtra," Mr Ketkar says. "Nothing much happened here. So the Mumbai attacks will not be a deciding factor."

The killings, suggests Mr Ketkar, may be only a factor in upscale south Mumbai where the rich and "beautiful people" live. But the problem is that it is also the most politically alienated constituency in the country - not so long ago, it recorded a lowly 29% turnout in a general election. South Mumbai long ago seceded from the republic of India, in a manner of speaking. The rich here don't really need the government. "They live," as Mr Ketkar, says "with one foot in Mumbai, and the other in New York." The poor need the government more, and Mumbai is overflowing with them.

So what does Mumbai's 26/11 stand for then? I ask Mr Ketkar. Surely, it cannot but leave some imprint on the people and their lives?

"The attacks stand for the rejuvenation of Mumbai's middle class. The city has always had an indifferent middle class. The attacks will possibly prod more middle class Mumbai residents to go out and vote this time. But that will not have any bearing on the final result. No way."

Today's morning papers echo Mr Ketkar's sentiments. "Will Mumbai come out and vote?" asks a front page headline. Last election, less than half of the registered voters cast their ballots. "The Mumbai voter is in an aggressive mood, desperate for change. One hopes it translates into a record turnout on the 30th. I have my doubts," a prominent citizen tells the newspaper.

Mr Ketkar says there is no use being obsessed with the Mumbai votes. And there is more to Mumbai than the attacks, he says, which will be engaging the voters. People are disillusioned with the Congress government, he says, because it is seen as lackadaisical and disinterested. After the siege of the Taj hotel ended last November, the former chief minister took his film actor son and a filmmaker friend to see the devastation at the hotel. The filmmaker was apparently scouring for ideas for his next film. The press dubbed it "disaster tourism". The chief minister lost his job.

Then there is an anti-migrant workers movement whipped up by a local xenophobic party which wants jobs for locals - a "lot of political nuisance really", Mr Ketkar says. The perceived marginalisation of the local Marathi people - who comprise more than 40% of the city's population - is a real issue. The city is bursting at its seams, and constant mention of its fabled "resilience" by the national media irritates the locals no end.

So is Mumbai a curse for Maharashtra, in a sense? "In a sense, yes," Mr Ketkar says, before rushing off to a meeting. "It is a curse." I would say Mumbai is both a blessing and a curse.

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Life doesn't halt for a second at Mumbai's Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) railway station. Some 2.5 million people pass through the gothic Victorian terminus every day. Over a thousand trains arrive at and depart from its 18 platforms. The station itself employs a staggering 2,400 people to look after it - 800 of them are guards and cleaners.

Ashok Kumar Tiwari, however, remembers the time that life stopped at CST one night last November. The middle-aged station manager's eyes well up when I ask him the question. We are sitting in a well-appointed ante-room adjoining his office overlooking the concourse.

What do you remember about the night?

Mr Tiwari looks away for a moment, collects his thoughts and tells me the story.

"I was settling down for dinner at my home when my phone rang out. A panicky station master was on the line shouting, 'Sir, indiscriminate firing is taking place here.' I decided I had to run back."

Early TV pictures were already beaming shaky images of the mayhem breaking out in the city. Mr Tiwari's station, two hotels, a café and a Jewish centre had been attacked by a group of gunmen.

As he got ready to rush back to the station, Mr Tiwari's 12-year-old son stopped him.

"He implored, 'Papa don't go, don't go'. I told him as long as Lord Krishna is alive in my heart nothing will happen." Lord Krishna is the most loved deity of the many Indian gods. And then, he says, he was off.

He says he can never forget the sight that greeted him when he arrived. "There were people dead and dying on the concourse. There were pools of blood. The sight was terrifying, terrifying."

Then, he says, he got to work with his army of employees, taking the injured to hospital, washing the blood-slicked floor, ordering incoming trains to stop in their tracks. His employees, he says, even took a stray puppy wounded by a bullet to the nearest veterinary clinic.

"But I had to keep the station running next day at any cost," he says.

He did. The first train left the station on time, at 3.28 am, five and a half hours after the killings. (I remember when I walked into the station next morning people were already pouring in to catch their trains. Bleaching powder had been heaped all over the place, but it still stank of death.)

How did you cope with the incident, I ask Mr Tiwari, a veteran railwayman. As the chief manager for the past four years, he had faced challenges before: rail services came to a halt after rains had flooded the tracks once, and there had been the serial train blasts on the busy suburban network in 2006.

"No, no," he says. "This was different. I am a civil servant. We are in the business of selling services. We have no defence training. We do not know how to take on terrorists. Maybe all of should be given some training..." he trails off, lost in his thoughts.

"Things were not easy, you see," he continues. "For 20-25 days after the incident, I had nightmares. I had high blood pressure."

What were the dreams you had, I ask him.

"I had two dreams. In one I saw a lot of blood flowing all over. In another, I had screaming people fleeing the station. I couldn't sleep. I increased chanting my prayers. Meditation helped."

Is he afraid it could happen again?, I ask.

"As long as Lord Krishna is there with me, it will not happen again. We have more security, more surveillance cameras," he says softly.

Outside his office, a black marble memorial to the people who died at the station on 26 November is a sombre reminder of the horrors of the black night. We counted the names of 52 victims on the memorial. Twenty of them were Muslim. Two of the victims were never identified. Six of them were railway employees. One of them was Inspector Shinde, a railway police inspector.

"You know, I used to know him well," says Mr Tiwari, his voice quavering.

He picks up his mobile phone and scans his contacts. "I haven't erased his number from my list yet. I remember him so well."

Outside his office, the CST, like all big railway stations in India, is a veritable city. Indians come and make it their home as they wait to catch trains. They eat, sleep and talk there. They drink water from its marble fountain taps. So the concourse is packed with waiting passengers, and entire families are asleep on the floor. A prowling sniffer dog is the only reminder that India's railroad cities also feel less secure.

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Bombay is a crowd, wrote , when he came visiting the city in the late 1980s.

Two decades later, the rechristened Mumbai is a crush. Its streets are bursting with traffic, its sidewalks exploding with people. People walk briskly and with purpose undeterred by the muggy heat and the overwhelming human mass.

To get into India's financial and entertainment capital by train as we did this morning, you have to brace yourself for scenes of severe urban blight - rotting tin shanties, burning garbage, people defecating on the tracks. Brightly coloured, derelict suburban trains, which are the lifeline of the city, rumble by. The factory walls on the sides of the tracks are plastered with posters hawking English classes."Speakwell English Academy," said one. "Just Rs 750".

We drive into the city and walk into the heavily secured Taj hotel. My luggage is checked three times and scanned. It's the part of the hotel that escaped unscathed during the bloody attacks on its more famous 'antique' wing next door last November.

Memories from five months ago flood my mind. We had taken the first flight to Mumbai from Delhi after the attack and spent the next 10 days or so camped outside the hotel near the Gateway of India. Gunshots would ring out intermittently and small fires light up rooms in the old wing. In the end, the dead were taken out on gurneys.

I look down from my room on the street where we had hung around during the siege of the hotel. "All is fine now. Relax," a room service man tells me, reassuringly. Mumbai refuses to cow down.

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In the old, walled city of Ahmedabad, aspirations are running high. Here, New India is wooing the Old India with its seductive charms. In its damp, serpentine lanes dotted with decaying elegant homes, I spotted a chalk-written advertisement on the building of a house restored with the help of the French government: "Feel like heaven, Come to Scotland and Paris for $250," followed by a telephone number. I was so tempted I had half a mind to call up the number to find out more details about what must be the cheapest tourist package out of India. But I had the train to catch - tonight, we leave Ahmedabad for our next destination, Mumbai.

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Is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's legacy dead in his land of birth? I gently put the question to 75-year-old Amrit Modi, the caretaker of the Sabarmati ashram in Ahmedabad. The ashram - a hermetic community - was home to Gandhi for 13 years, from 1917 to 1930. It was at this 2.5 acre patch of land on the banks of the Sabarmati river that he undertook his experiments in self reliance and community living. It was from here that he also stirred a nation against its colonial rulers.

We are sitting in Mr Modi's quiet office behind a thriving shop which sells Gandhi books and memorabilia to visitors. He looks at me and shakes his head in disagreement. I push on. What would Gandhi have made of the deep religious divide in today's Gujarat? Would he have endorsed the unabashed consumerism in one of India's best-developed states? Aren't the Gandhian values of non-violence and frugality dead here?

"No, no, you are mistaken," the avuncular Mr Modi finally answers, rather feebly. "There is no decline in Gandhian values in Gujarat."

So what about the 2002 anti-Muslim riots that killed more than 1,000 people? What about the increasing ghettoisation of people along religious lines?

"People are quarrelling. They quarrel over money and politics. There are such tensions all over the world," Mr Modi says, avoiding a direct answer.

In the well maintained brick and mortar buildings of the Sabarmati's ashram, Gandhi's legacy is alive and well. More than 1,000 people, Mr Modi informs me, still flock to the place every day, checking out its museum and its activities. It is alive in the way 500 poor tribal girls live and study here. It is alive in the 150 families who still live in the ashram, making handmade paper, cooking oil and khadi, the coarse handspun cloth favoured by Gandhi.

In modern India's collective consciousness, Gandhi, I believe, is struggling to stay alive. Non-violent protests are an exception to the rule. The great man hardly tops any youth icon polls; he enjoyed a brief spurt of popular adulation a few years ago when a Bollywood comedy had as its hero a bumbling, affable toughie who is transformed into a bumbling, affable advocate of non-violence after an encounter with the ghost of Gandhi.

Mr Modi, who has been lovingly looking after the ashram for 36 years without a break, does not believe in the slow death of the Gandhian legacy. "Lots of youngsters," he says, "are inspired by Gandhi even today."

Outside, near Gandhi's residential quarters, sits a lonely Gandhian at a spinning wheel. Kishor Bhai Gohel is a retired income tax inspector who has been coming to the ashram regularly for the last six years. Here, he spends seven hours spinning thread and teaching children. In three hours, he says, he spins 500 metres of thread into garlands. "I come here to spend my time. I feel relaxed."

Sabarmati ashram is a humbling experience. "Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test," writes Gandhi in a typewritten manuscript displayed at the ashram. "Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it?"

It is time to leave. I try Mr Modi again.

"Don't see Gandhi through the prism of India," he says. "Gandhi belongs to the world."

But what if India forgets him? "I have to be optimistic," says Amrit Modi. "I cannot give up hope."

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Last night, I wondered whether India's shadow prime minister would receive the same treatment as the prime minister in Ahmedabad. He sure did. This time, a Hindu sadhu (holy man) hurled his footwear at BJP leader and prime ministerial candidate LK Advani, who is standing in a constituency in Gujarat. This happened hours after a student threw his shoe at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during a campaign meeting in the state. Politics is a great leveller.

Shoes have certainly enlivened a relatively dull campaign. "It's Raining Shoes in Ahmedabad", screamed an excited front page headline in this morning's local newspaper. "PM Singh 'Shoet' At In City," says a tabloid headline, playing with words. Another paper said that shoes had become a popular "political missile".

The motivations of India's shoe-throwing brigade are varied. Some say they have thrown footwear to express their disgust with the slow justice system and joblessness. The computer science student who targeted the prime minister on Sunday told the police, according to a local paper, that he was driven by "instant publicity and not political inclinations". The ochre-robed holy man who flung his footwear at Mr Advani was apparently unhappy that the powerful politician had not done enough to stop the slaughter of cows, which are sacred animals for Hindus.

Mr Advani must be a bit embarrassed though. He now has the dubious distinction of being the target of flying footwear for the second time during the campaign. To add to the embarrassment, on both occasions, supporters of his party and faith appear to have been the culprits.

To be fair to the politicians, all the shoe throwers have been "forgiven" for their sins. But some of their party members are clearly not taking this latest method of protest and publicity lightly. "It is indicative of the bad governance and poor law and order situation that prevails in the state," a glum Congress party spokesman said. I don't think voters in Gujarat, a BJP stronghold, are going to be impressed by this statement.

But the local police claim to be taking the "threat" from shoe throwers seriously. "We had received information three days ago that some people were being primed to throw shoes at [Congress leader party] Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh," a senior policeman said. Another policeman claimed that they had removed a man who had turned up for Mr Advani's meeting because they "suspected him to be a show-thrower".

I have no idea how you spot a potential shoe thrower. Does he have a tic? Does he keep looking at his shoes? Does he move around without tying his laces? And will the police now ask people to remove their footwear to attend campaign meetings? Imagine thousands of barefoot Indians listening to their leaders in the meetings. Imagine armies of shoe throwers being trained in camps to hurl their missiles with precision. The mind boggles.

PS: Some of you have expressed a range of concerns over the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's India Election Train. ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World Service director Peter Horrocks answers those questions in his blog

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For readers who want to follow our journey in pictures, we are using the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World Service flickr page. The flickr page can be found at

Also, every time I add a post to this blog, a new tweet will go out on twitter. The twitter feed can be found at

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Ahmedabad is boiling. The city is like a cauldron sucking the life out of its usually energetic people. They walk around languidly, almost in slow motion. Traffic is thin, and the drivers irate. A prolonged heat wave simply refuses to abate.

My driver cranks up the air-conditioning in the car but the heat roils inside the vehicle. He tells me it is 43 degrees centigrade at midday. That is when we have rolled into the city, the first stop on our cross-country election journey on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ train. A gust of hot air hits my face as soon as I disembark, and the heat soars when I step out of the unusually quiet railway platform.

Did the heat trip up a young man who ended up hurling a shoe at the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, at his modestly-attended election meeting here today? The news channels reported the shoe landed some 20-ft away from Mr Singh as he droned on about economic development. The prime minister is the fourth politician who has had footwear thrown at him from members of the public - and in one instance, a journalist- in the past month or so. Like the other high-profile targets, Mr Singh has also forgiven the shoe-thrower, it is being reported.

The TV channels showed the young culprit - a student of computer science- being taken away by the police. He may have been bored by Mr Singh's speech, a friend here quipped. Talking about the virtues of economic development in Gujarat, he says, is like preaching to the converted. People in this industrially developed state have for long enjoyed the fruits of relative development, unlike many benighted parts of India.

The local Sunday papers are full of politics and cricket, the twin Indian obsessions. Ahmedabad and the rest of the western Gujarat state go to polls on Thursday, so politics is the flavour of the season. Following Mr Singh's is the shadow prime minister and BJP's LK Advani's public meeting in the evening. Will the people who turn up there now be required to take off their shoes?

Then there is the cricket. Two Gujarat-born brothers, who are also members of the Indian cricket team, are pitted against each other in a day into night game in the ongoing Indian Premier League tournament in South Africa. The tournament was banished abroad this season due to security concerns at home. India, clearly, cannot handle a twin challenge of cricket and political shoe-throwing at the same time.

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Three hours into our journey and we have already been mobbed by the crowds. We made an unscheduled stop at Rewari, some 80km from Delhi in neighbouring Haryana state, when a motley group of local passengers waiting at the station spotted our unusual train and surged forward. The excitement was palpable. "What is it this? A new train? What route?" a man shouted.

As my colleagues stepped out with their mikes and cameras to record the experience, the frisson increased. Haryana is one of the more industrially developed states in the country, but casteism is the bane of social progress in these parts too. I asked a wizened man who stood near our carriage whether caste and kin affiliations of a candidate mattered more than his capacity to deliver the goods during the polls. He was fiercely argumentative. "Look," he said, visibly irritated. "I have lived here, in the countryside, all my life, but I have never voted on the basis of caste. I have always voted on the basis of development. This time too, I will vote for the candidate who promises more development."

Clearly, development has never been a bigger issue at the Indian elections than this time around. I look out of my window and realise why. There are Indias which are pulling ahead and there are Indias which are lagging behind. People are impatient for speedier change.

There is no better way to gauge the rhythms of the heart of India than from a railway journey. Within an hour of leaving a station in Delhi, I witness a kaleidoscope of the many Indias from my window. Garbage-infested shantytowns which straddle railroad tracks segue into a spanking new airport coming up on the outskirts of Delhi. An impossibly long line of stationary goods trains carrying shiny new Suzuki cars from a local factory merge into a hick town railway station splashed with advertisements hawking sex potions, an anti-foeticide campaign and even a local vet. Gaudily coloured row houses and high rises dot the view, which was not so long ago dominated by a dull landscape of vast swathes of dusty farms.

With dusk falling over the countryside, we rolled out of Rewari. People at crowded railway crossings gaped at our red-and-white train. It slowly trundled past squat railway colonies where children played precariously close the tracks and elders sipped tea on rope beds. We are travelling into the heart of many Indias. Already.

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Finally, we are off. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ India election train rumbled out of a quiet station in Delhi, close to the upscale Safdarjung neighbourhood, at exactly three in the afternoon local time. I have to say the seven-coach train is looking really good, branded in red and white. We have begun the 8000km, eight-city, 18-day journey at last.

I am travelling in an air-conditioned coach with a musty, red carpet, and a door handle hanging precariously. An old Incredible India poster hangs near my bunk extolling the virtues of the Buddha. The bunks have fraying red upholstery and there is a little formica-topped storage space. Not bad for a first class coach on Indian Railways.

Our colleagues turned out in full force to see us off and there were instantly-printed framed photographs of us at the station. Members of the Indian media came along too - so let's see how they have to say.

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The day has arrived. After months of feverish planning, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ India election train is set to chug out of a station in Delhi in a few hours. We have invited the capital's press corps to a posh hotel to tell them about our journey and how we plan to engage our viewers, listeners and readers on this unique journey. Joining me on the trip are colleagues from around the world representing the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's various language services. Our marketing people tell me that over 130 publications in India have so far carried the story of our planned journey. They are calling it a "fantastic expedition" with a big "wow factor". We even have a white publicity T-shirt. Emblazoned on its back is a Hindi slogan, which translated reads: "Will the Indian vote drive the world's fortunes?" It's a good question.

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The second phase of voting is under way and it appears to be much quieter than the first round which was marked by Maoist violence in parts. The situation in Sri Lanka dominates the headlines in three of the five main English newspapers in Delhi, so India seems to have settled into the groove of a long, hot election without much ado.

A heat wave is till scorching most of the country, and making things difficult for campaigning politicians and journalists on their trail. India's politicians are quite a reviled lot, but you have to admire their stamina in going around in the heat seeking votes.

I read about a Mumbai filmmaker-turned-politician who is moving around in an air-conditioned sedan in dirt-poor Bihar. "[He gets] out in the stinging heat, grabs a few farmers' hands, cuddles a couple of unclad kids, asks if they know who he is and jumps right back in," says the report. This possibly won't win votes for this debutant politician. You have to get down and dirty and work really hard to convince people to vote for you in India.

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There was talk of political ennui.

There was speculation that this would be a duller election - in part because of the hugely popular Indian Premier League cricket, .

But this evening's and voter enthusiasm have proved the soothsayers wrong. Braving boiling heat and , India has again .

There has been no shortage of bad blood and the campaign has at times turned personal, with senior politicians trading personal charges.

But it seems that the voter has not been turned off by the warring politicians or by the sometimes low level of debate. Ballots are being cast with a vengeance, perhaps to teach a lesson to the recalcitrant politicians.

This is just the beginning of what looks to be a very interesting and closely-fought election. If cricket is a religion in India, politics - not to mention elections - is an addiction.

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Hi. I'm Soutik Biswas and I'm the India online editor for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News. I have also worked with Indian newspapers and magazines and am a from .

Over the next month, join me on a journey to explore and from those they vote to power.

The world's biggest election is now under way. A highlight of will be a cross-country journey by train. Join me on a 18-day, eight-city, 6,000km tour from which I will be bringing you stories of the journey and the people I meet on it.

I and my ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ colleagues will sleep, eat and work on the train. During the stops, we will meet and interview politicians and businessmen and give you a feel of what they're thinking on the street in India.

The world's biggest election lives up to its name because Indians love to vote. A cluster of villages on the Andhra-Maharashtra border once voted twice after they were given voting cards by administrations in both states! The poor vote more than the privileged. Peasants go to polls defying Maoist diktats. I remember a cloth merchant from Bhopal who cheerily fought elections against five different prime ministers and lost every time. He fought elections, he said once, "to make everyone realise that democracy was meant for one and all".

I am city-bred, belong to India's thriving middle class, and don't claim to be an authority on every aspect of India's complicated society and politics. But there is no greater pleasure than coming to understand how complex multi-ethnic societies like India work: I have learned more political science and sociology trawling India's cities and villages than from my college textbooks.

India poses formidable challenges to a journalist. To fathom Indian democracy is to find clues to the riddles of human lives and behaviour. And there is no better time to go looking for answers than during a general election.

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