A Sojourn with Indian Railways

A few paragraphs out of my travel journal (the one I always start but never maintain).

4:32 PM - As I start this post, I stand at the station of Bijrotha. Surprisingly, my phone has detected traces of a local network in the middle of nowhere (in the modern world, there’s nowhere you can’t receive messages from marketeers selling sauna belts) and some quick Googling reveals that it’s on the railway line from Bhopal to Jhansi. All of this is significant because I’m on a train from Bombay to Delhi and I was supposed to be reaching there right now, after taking into account a 6 hour departure delay. And this on Rajdhani, India’s supreme train.

7:39 PM - Goodbye Jhansi and good riddance!

For the uninitiated, we stood outside Jhansi for two hours before finally making our way into the station. Quite obviously, people aren’t very happy. Ironically, they’ve been responsible for keeping me entertained for the better part of the day with their constant complaining, cussing and cribbing. Your quintessential pessimist has blamed the Indian Railways, Mamata Bannerjee, the Congress, China and his own children for our situation, before turning on the old favourite, the ‘system’, trashing democracy and calling for all politicians and bureaucrats to be jailed or executed. If only all of our lives were that simple, eh?

My day hasn’t been as boring as you might think. I’ve cherished a day time train journey for a long time and while this wasn’t quite how I imagined it, it hasn’t been unpleasant. As the rest of my family snored away for most of the afternoon, I made the most of some empty seats, a good book and plenty of time. It’s a very strong childhood memory – sitting in a train, admiring the sights going by, getting off at every station to buy hot yummies and rapidly getting through a good novel. And so, today was nostalgic...

... but at the end of the day, I am missing a great party which I’ve been looking forward to all vacation long. Not the ideal way to spend Christmas. Oh well! Merry Christmas to all of you folks. Let the festivities get to you, have a great time and be glad you didn’t spend the whole day in a train!

11:57 PM - Reaching Agra in 10 minutes. That’s the message we’ve been getting for the past hour. The fog has settled in but there’s just too much smoke in it to call it pretty. Everyone’s fallen asleep for the second time this journey and when you’re served bananas for dinner, you know something is seriously wrong. Met a Gujju kid (they’re everywhere, aren’t they?) who said he loses 30-0 whenever he plays FIFA. Just to rub it in, I made him watch me demolish Real Madrid with my Dream Team Barcelona line-up. It’s amazing how much fun it is to do the same thing, over and over and over again!

As Christmas comes to a close, we’re officially into festivity week and how do I celebrate this annual occurrence? Watching a cockroach crawl into my co-passenger’s ear (I swear this happened) while he sleeps open-mouthed, drooling all over the place. Not a pretty image.

We finally reached at 07:00 AM the next morning (a total delay of 20 hours), tired and hungry and disgusted and (insert similar adjective). Have a good festive season.