From: paulchem@tigger.cs.Colorado.EDU (Icarus)
Subject: Trains -I
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 04:01:50 GMT


1] This is a writeup about train travel in India.
   This is the first part, the second was posted a day ago.

2] 

 I remember the groups of small children who would invade 
 our compartment, and sing those romantic songs of yesteryear that
 have become permanently embedded in our minds. 
 There is something so moving about these children singing
 "Jab hum jawaan honge, jaane kaha honge, jahaa honge ..." 
  -- I dont know where I will be when these years pass and I 
 grow up, but wherever I am ...---  from Betaab,
 in a train full of middle class aspirations. You turn your eyes to 
 the window to hide the tears that have sprung up in them. The passing
 trees and brown fields and the far outlines of hills that appear to be
 mountains in the darkening day always calm and settle the mind.

 As a child awake at nights I have battled so often and so bravely to
 keep from getting up and yanking the red cylinder that hung from a chain
 with a sign next to it, that said : "To Stop Train, Pull Chain". The only
 thing that kept me from trespassing was the dreadful message in stenciled 
 white that seemed to intone in legalese : "Pulling of chain due to 
 insufficient reason will result ...". So many times I have held that chain
 and dragged it just a fraction of an inch. Nobody noticed me. Nothing came of
 the long wait for bells to ring and red lights to go on. No khakhi clad
 railway man came running in to apprehend. I imagined a thread that ran from 
 compartment to compartment and finally to a table in front of the driver.
 

 I remember when I was asked to deliver a talk on trains as part of my training
 in Rourkela. As usual I got carried away by the fervor of my own voice and
 added somewhat unnecessarily "And No, contrary to popular imagination there
 is no Steering Wheel in the engine room." I was promptly dumbstruck by a 
 question from the audience asking in all innocence how a train took turns.
 And for the next hour we were entertained by a staff member in intricate 
 equations in dynamics and centrifugal force and sliding axles. Never had I
 thought that so much was happening under my feet while we took a curve.


 I once drove a Czech medium haul engine through some 15 km of worn track.
 There really is nothing to it. A speed control and a direction reversal
 stick. Some horns and some brakes. Boredom was the only enemy. The Feeling
 of Power is intoxicating. You know you can demolish the training centre
 and punish the cook in that horrible Mess by running him down, chasing
 him, taunting him with a mild 5 km per hour glide and finishing him off
 with the speed stick touching the floor. Anyway not many people know what
 a flashing yellow signal means. It means:  back off slowly.


 You turn to the window and try to take advantage of the silence that forms
 out of the constant noise that the people are making playing cards by 
 trying to work out the answer to various questions. In the years that have
 gone by these questions have changed character. It used to be why trees at a 
 distance move slower than the ones nearer, or why the windows turn into 
 one-way mirrors when darkness falls. Later I would move on to deeper things.
 What was love ? Of course all the countless journeys in the trains I have 
 taken have never been enough to know the answer to that one. There is one
 train that maybe knows a little more, but it still screams out of a terminus
 now long lost in time and distance, never quite arriving. But that is a 
 room of my memory that I leave locked and never visit alone.


 Morning always bought a short lived sensation of disorientation.
 You woke up with a start and can not remember where you are or why 
 you are in a room that swings from side to side filled with unmoving
 bodies like a scene from Robin Cook's Coma. 

 With the first light streaming in you look around your fellow passengers
 and smile and say a few words, "Good Morning" if the clothes say it 
 should be said, or a simple "Kahan Ja Rahe Ho Ji ?" otherwise. 
 The insufficient sleep always made the plainest women in their early 
 morning dishabille appear very desirable. Then the conversations 
 would begin to be interrupted by the calls of "Chaya, Chaya, Kappee, Kappee"
 in the south or a rapid "Cha-Cofee, Cha-Cofee" when traveling in the North
 of India. 

 In the days when Sikhs identified too strongly with India to be offended by
 jokes about them I remember one that I heard as a child.
 There are these two sardarjis all alone in a compartment of a train 
     starting from madras central.

     After a while one of them asks the other: "Aji, Aap kaha ja rahe hain ?"
         --- Where are you going sir ?
     The other gentleman responds: "Hum Bombhai jah rahe hai, aap kaha ja 
     rahe hai ?" 
         --- Im going to Bombay, and you sir ?
     And the first one says: " Achha, hum jalandhar ja rahe hain ji".
         --- I see, Im going to jalandhar.
     After a long silence the second one says: 
                             "science ka kaisa kharisma hai yeh,
                              compartment ka ek berth ja raha hai bombhai,
                              aur dhoosra ja raha hai jalandhar !".

         --- What a miracle of science this is, one berth of the
             compartment is going to bombay and the other to jalandhar !!

 I had grown used to those giant stations that mark the progress of  the
 trans-indian journeys. Jollarpettai, Guntur, Gwalior, Itarsi, Vizag.
 The way the vegetation and the features of the landscapes changes from the
 alluvial plains of the deccan to the burning forests of madhya pradesh
 in summer to the foothills of the western ghats where you can see the clouds
 gathering as you go, during the monsoon.

3] Stay Cool.


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.    ~ ~                                                                     .
.    o o      signito ergo sum.              paul chemmanoor.                .
.     |    i sign therefore i am.            Computer Science department.    .
.     =                                      Univ. of Colorado, Boulder.     .
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