“As the 3.25 south bound roared in, the sleepers sprang to life, and the station filled with clamour and shouting cries of water and sweetmeat vendors, shouts of policemen, and shrill yells of women gathering up their baskets, their families and their husbands..”
-Description of a train Journey from ‘Kim’ Rudyard Kipling: 1901
It isn’t very different now in the 21st century. There is something about the Indian Railways. Kipling will always be remembered as a Victorian poet who was fascinated with the Indian Railways. There is a distinct character of an Indian train, which is hard to find anywhere else in the world.
Blowing the whistle
Every day, on an average, more than 8,350 trains ply some 50,000 miles [80,000 km] of running track, carrying over 12.5 million passengers. Freight trains haul goods in excess of 1.3 million tons. Together, each day these cover a distance equal to three and a half times the distance to the moon! Indian trains go across the country and cover a total length of 63,140 km (39,233 miles).
“It was really commerce that led to that historic occassion in 1853 when India’s first railway train steamed off in an atmosphere of great excitement from Bombay to Thana, a distance from 34 miles. Within the next decade, the great Indian Pensinsular Railway took off in the Deccan Plateau. Soon the country was criss- crossed by an extensive network of railway lines, bring north to south, east to west, enabling people to discover the diversity of India.”
-From Indian Railway Stories, Ruskin Bond, 1994
The Indian railway stations is probably the best and perhaps the only place where you can find people across all ages, classes, destinations and any other difference one can find. Picture this, play it In your ear. Taxi horns, paper sellers, local food sellers, telephone rings, cow bell, cars, pre recorded announcement, baby crying, feet rushing, train steaming off, laughter, dogs, construction work, whistle blowing, book sellers, beggars, tea and coffee seller making sure that everyone at the station buys at least one cup of coffee. Order in Chaos, method in madness.
Through looking glass
As the chu chuk choo, disappears in its smoke, it’s a window to realities we are used to forgetting back home.
“You see places that would look bad from the front, and from the back that from the train, look apocalyptic. You see the scrap heaps, junkyards, power plants. But the train keeps moving, passing all of it by, rolling down the rails toward what might turn out to be another great adventure.”
-Anonymous
It’s perhaps the first time you will see many things, separated by merely a glass window and the pace of the train. Some visuals may seem to be rushing too fast, some are just redundant, some just don’t seem to pass for long stretches of time. From endless roads to rushed stations, to barren land, to green pastures, to mustard fields and snow capped mountains…people sitting, waiting, watching, running, staring – some times you just want to pull that chain, stop the train and find out more- where are they headed, what are they thinking, why were they here, when will they reach. It’s overwhelming, melancholic and real at the same time. So close to reality, yet so far. And when the train finally stops, you’re still moving in your head. Slowly you’ll be back on your own track.
Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen." – Benjamin Disraeli
Safe Journey
In a country like India, there has always been the tradition of long goodbyes and full goodbyes, predominantly the middle class. Goodbyes start from home. A set of instructions to be followed on reaching the destination, plop a sweet before you leave home, a general discussion on crimes in the city, and then starts the full goodbye. It was common to see the whole family at the station waving goodbyes, shedding tears – all synchronized, adorably dramatized. This tradition has slipped into the hands of time and disappeared as modernity set it.
Inside a train – It’s a common platform for all kinds of people and to be sharing it for a long time eventually leads to different consequences – connections, estrangement, conversations, memories, love, anger etc. Every experience is unique. Some get jobs on trains, some fall in love, some get drunk, some win games, some lose money, some talk endless, sometimes there is so much silence and it’s only the sound of a train. It’s worth experimenting to see where it takes you.
Waiting at a railway station can be just as bad as missing a train. It’s fascinating to watch people’s faces as they wait. Expressions progress from irritable to looking angry to pacing up and down then getting used to it the wait then buying coffee or tea hoping that it will arrive by the end of it then buying a newspaper and pretending to be reading it instead observing people pacing up and down… the train still hasn’t arrived. So then maybe looking at any reflective surface to check if his/her hair is in order, buying another cup of tea, strike a conversation with anyone waiting around or a vendor, getting his shoe polished, eating some junk food, giving up the train. |
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Just after all the little distractions, finding a corner to get a short nap amidst the din, while suddenly the whistle blows loud enough to wake up someone in deep sleep! The train has arrived. On the local train or the metros it’s just the opposite, there are no benches to sit, your just floating with the punctuality. The metros have been successfully managed to control crowds and maintain cleanliness in railway platforms. Metros clearly treat the stations as railway stations and not as homes, shelters, occupational purposes, and the like. But on a local train platform within a city there is too much life and character to consume. But a local always gets used to it.
Re-berth
Be sure to be stuck with the most diverse people on an Indian train. You could be stuck with anyone from a politician who is fighting for the rights of minorities, to an old woman who runs a school in the mountains, to an editor who could have lost his voice because he never spoke for many years and now has a throat surgery in Delhi, to a youngster who wants to flirt with nature and the like to house wives indulged in chatting away about their chores and woes to sadhus meditating and taking a smoke break, some just never wake up and some just lay dug into their books or glass windows. Imagine the scope of conversations. You will meet different such permutations and combinations of people.
Train journeys make you forget where you are coming from and voila! Suddenly you are in a whole new world, with strangers becoming so familiar. You feel like you are getting to know yourself again. For some it could be taking a break from the rush of life, for some it’s cheaper than a plane, for others it’s about togetherness and for some there is no choice. This often determines the moods of passengers and has an impact on conversation. The warming up stage is the most intriguing, since everyone is a stranger and suddenly one person decides to break the ice. And slowly the rest pitch in with their details and interested people pursue an endless conversation.
For women things are always different. If she is alone, she is usually reluctant to be too social as a result of the growing violence against women, insecurity and fear. Not always does it have to manifest like this, she could just meet someone who connects instantly. But if she is with a friend, she is submerged in conversation. In a group, it’s easy to be herself.
That’s the beauty of a train journey since everything is a probability and nothing is defined. Your personality goes a complete circle and there are new sides you discover about yourself – the unspoken, the unheard and unseen. A rebirth of sorts.
Rail-ways
Nothing in India is complete without a train journey. It’s represents the authenticity of the India’s culture in more ways than one. From writers to critics to filmmakers to radio-announcers, to playwrights to actors, the elements of a train somehow had to figure in their works.
The Indian Railways is the second largest network in the world and Bollywood makes the highest number of films in the world. Like the Indian Railways, Bollywood is a common platform for different castes, classes, languages and religion. Both reflect different aspects of human life in the country. Take an average Hindi movie. Boy meets girl in the train or on the railway platform and the seeds of romance are sown. Boy quarrels with girl on some pretext and they travel in different directions, again by train. Boy and girl decide to come together, this is achieved, courtesy railways. In Dil Se, the lead actor Shah Rukh Khan makes a radio documentary on his newfound love at the railway station using the most unique ways to create the sounds at a railway station.
Mohandas Gandhi, whose political awakening began when he was expelled from a first-class rail compartment in South Africa because of his skin colour, condemned railways as carries of disease and disrupters of self-sufficient rural economies. But Gandhi’s political heirs did not share his suspicion of Western-style modernisation and development. Railways continued to expand in post-independence India, binding far-flung towns and villages. In the film “Pather Panchali,” the first in Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, the symbolically charged arrival of the train in the Bengal countryside heralds the displacement of a rural family. You can almost feel the wind blow against your face as the train passes through wheat fields, rural India and finally the town side.
The Indian Railways was an inspiration to most Indian writers. Somehow it seemed to be an ideal socio-political representation of the country, always moving, evolving, never stagnant. Khushwant Singh reflected the tragedy of the Partition in Train to Pakistan, Jim Corbett’s Loyalty set in a train explains why he was so loyal to India and Rohinton Mistry’s Fine Balance takes you in and out of life’s compartments.
There will be colourful memories, space to walk around – compartments, stations, at junctions and signals. The journey is longer and helps you slow down, making you blink slower, searching conversations with strangers, seeing the world pass by your window; the train will rock you in a cradle at night and the rhythm will keep you up through the day. One journey will never be like another. Make time to see the morning turn into dusk and twilight. Get set for your magical mystery tour, on a railway track.
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