Rahul Gandhi's Peter Jenkins walk covers 100 days across India
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New Delhi: Rahul Gandhi can claim he is a leader who can walk the talk.
Rather than stop in the middle of the cross-country leg work, he walked some 2,600 km in hundred days.
At 6 am today, he was on the road again from Meena High Court, Dausa in Rajasthan to cover some 500 km, before entering Haryana on December 21.
For the next 17 days, he will lead a band of enthusiastic Congress workers, taking breaks for a stump speech here, and a press meet there.
Celebrating 100 days of walk, Congress's official Twitter account changed its display picture (DP) to "100 days of Yatra.", India Today reported.
As part of the celebrations, he will attend a live performance at the Albert Hall at around 7 pm today.
A walk across India's crazily varying landscape involves blazing sun, sultry weather, and vicissitudes of rain and wind.
Rahul Gandhi is setting a record of sorts in politics with his long walk, spending at least 24 km a day in one of the biggest public outreach in politics in years.
Kamal Nath, former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh earlier said that Gandhi begins the walk at 6 am every day.
Earlier Telangana Congress president A. Revanth Reddy likened Bharat Jodo Yatra to the Dandi March of Mahatma Gandhi, calling Rahul's historic event.
However, this long-drawn walk across India readily brings to mind the lone walk of across America by travel author Peter Jenkins in the 1970s. The book A Walk Across America came out in 1979 creating the widest ripples in travelogues.
Jenkins relates in his book his journey on foot from Alfred NewYork to New Orleans, Louisiana that helped him know himself and the lives of the people in the villages.
On the way he befriends strangers, lives with simple villagers, and often faces hostilities but later becomes friends with the same people, it was a momentous journey quite unlike anything that has ever been written.
As for Rahul, the journey is for invigorating the emaciated Congress. When he started walking a month ago, there was nothing to cheer him up, except the enthusiasm of the workers who walked with him.
Months into it, Rahul found enthusiasm in the media petering out, and there came polls in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh.
Except for the success in Himachal Pradesh, the situation in Gujarat shows the party's gradual sinking into insignificance.
The Bharat Jodo Yatra has so far covered Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh before entering Rajasthan.