Train journeys in India bear testimony to the fact that revival of a nation hinges not just in the building of mighty cities, but along the great swathes of tracks crisscrossing a nation, the umpteen dilapidated stations mottling their course, the ghosts-of-another-era trains that chug along, and the mindsets of the railway babus that could impossibly be filthier than the toilets on board offering to host every tourist hunting for the cultural miasma called India. While this development takes its rickety course, the train stations like the one I was yesterday would live through ordinary days and nights. Where, to cross from one platform to another, you will have to confront a broken down bridge in disuse, then take a course which looks like eternity at the end of the platform, meandering between hapless people sleeping in all possible orientations on the floor, hop over the tracks with the bulk weight of your luggage, dare the curious, loathsome, greedy looks of many others like me waiting for that magical moment when the loudspeakers would wake up with static to announce that leviathan of a machine which would loom before you, cutting through the thick veil of darkness, promising to pick you and drop you far from where you are, the long moustached policeman with a threatening menace and pair of chappels leveraging on his long rod for confidence to fend off hooligans and criminals who would leap from the darkness upon a hapless victim, the three legged traumatised dogs which hunts for that lost leg between the tracks, the self styled colourful cats hunting for the legacy rat, people smarted by the rail waiting in the opposite platform from where they should be to climb into their trains from the opposite side ahead of others. All these ordinariness, though, present a thoughtful picture of the challenges that stand before a nation in its way to progress, to a curiously thoughtful onlooker.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 04:20:03 +0000
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