From inside a train

27 May 2015 travel

This is a non-geek, super-normal Indian Railways traveller post!

This is a post that I am writing as I move rapidly towards Chennai, my final destination! The summer at KGP is over, and now, I go back home! (The train itself is around 5 hours late, so, in place of reaching Chennai at around 2300, I will be reaching around 0500 or 0600 the next morning.)

Trains are great places, if you get the right berth and the right set of people to travel with. In India, the set of people that you are travelling with takes on a more than could be expected level of importance, when you are travelling alone. This is because a lone traveller (wolf) on an Indian train is the must vulnerable (endangered) of species!

People travelling alone are plagued with requests to exchange their seats/berths. Sometimes, refusing does get a little hard, and most of the times, you end up exchanging!

Another very common thing encountered by all single travellers is the lack of company (You must be like: Duh!). Books serve best, Books on Paper have somehow evolved into TV Series on Laptops, for most college students!

And coming to the topic of students, and people of all kind, no internet. (Picture an exasperated always-online person saying that!) It’s not the lack of social networking, and Gmail that disturbs me, rather, it’s the inability to do anything that alarms me. And by anything, I mean, just about anything.

Writing a Node App, and want to install a plugin that writes JSON files painlessly? Sure, do it when you get home!

Now, coming back to the train itself, I started travelling in 3rd and 2nd AC compartments, around 2013, and since it’s air-conditioned, there’s no real problem. The windows remain useful all through the day, but the scenery, is, well repetitive, I guess is the right word. It’s almost like train tracks across India have been built in between fields and farms. Almost always, these fields have electric poles, and huge hubs right in the middle. This is the way it is no matter on which train you are, travelling wherever you want to!

So, as explained above, I will not be publihing this until I get home on 28th. But it just seemed right to give the date of the post as the date when I was in the train!