Day 60 - Nostalgia hits - Masaan and Lunchbox, Search for the Indian Railway Commercial Ticketing Manual

18 Apr 2017 100daysofwriting · hindi · lunchbox · masaan · movies · railways

Yesterday’s post, that I wrote 13 hours ago, was one of the most detailed and informative blog posts that I have written in this series for about 20 days now. I shared it with a lot of people, I hope people see it, read it and implement some of those measures in their lives too. For me, to implement all of those things took almost a year. I started with 2FA and now, I have implemented all of them. It takes considerable time and effort to implement some of those measures, but the time spent will be well worth it.

I had a strong bout of nostalgia today, movies related. I watched scenes from Masaan (2015) and Lunchbox (2013). A few letters, some great songs, some incredibly good actors. And scenes that are memorable for life. I wish they made more movies like this in the present times. Unsurprisingly, when I think of the last movie that I saw and really liked, the latest one I can remember is Yeh Jawani Hain Deewani which was released 4 years ago. It’s a sad state of affairs. (P.S. I really wish the publicity for Masaan had been great and I had seen that movie in a movie theater!)

Masaan had an especially dark middle part of the movie, it was a heart breaking scene to be honest. There are many spoilers to be given here, and I won’t talk about them. It hits you like a train would, I imagine.

Lunchbox had this insanely suspenseful sequence in it’s middle when suicide is on the cards for Nimrat Kaur’s character and her daughter. The picturing of the whole thing, my knowledge of the copycat effect and how it affects events like these, had my brain running full speed to find some way out of this. Some way to convince myself it won’t happen. It didn’t end up happening, I am SO glad for that. Sad endings only work to give the movie a bittersweet taste where you remember the movie for that particular bad event and everything else happened before and after, but that one bad event is always the defining moment for you in the movie.

In Masaan, Pankaj Tripathi’s character, who is an Indian Railways ticketing agent, has a book called the “Indian Railways Commercial Ticketing Manual” in his hand. Apparently, this manual consists of the instructions for new ticketing agents to learn how to generate tickets for their customers at the counter. A preliminary search lead me to this listing page for Codes, Manuals related to IR. The only manual that I could find which had a similar name was the Indian Railways Commercial Manual: Vol 1 I can’t be sure if this is the same book or not, I see no reason for them to put the manual online for anyone to read, but the difference in name could simply be because the online document was last published in 1992. That’s right! 25 YEARS AGO! There must definitely be a newer, better document that has the exact Ticketing information.

Considering that I wrote a post about this, it is my duty to find out as much as I can. Expect a comprehensive account of my search for the evasive Ticketing Manual: Vol 1 in the coming few posts in this series!

POST #60 is OVER