The Nightmare of Indian Railway Journey

Indian railway journey is a nightmare if viewed in a realistic perspective. In the first instance, you will encounter an avalanche of confusions and contradictions from the time you try to book your berth on a particular train. Very often, the information you receive at the enquiry counter may not be very reliable since graft and black-marketeering are endemic in the system. Characteristic of the paraphernalia of any developing economic system, the Indian railway is plagued by unending anomalies. Interestingly, all these maladies pile up on the ill-fated tax-payer who, while sustaining the system, bears the brunt of its pitfalls also!

If you are in an emergency and you cannot obtain reservation for your journey in the Indian railway, you will experience not just nightmare but simply hell while being alive and breathing on this beautiful planet. Tourists who travel without reservation are destined to survive in the unreserved compartments. It is a cattle-class virtually and hordes of commuters are herded into the compartments where you have to breathe out into the nostrils of your companion. This may be an over-simplification of the milieu in which under-privileged and ill-fated citizenry is packed like sardines sans ‘breathing-space’. Leaving the sardonic vein, when viewed in a “brutally positive” perspective, this whole violence, sound and fury of an Indian railway journey is an efficacious ‘exercise in national integration’. Here the catholicity of Indian populace consisting of the myriad of cultural, linguistic and regional identities fret and fume, sweat and swear and in the process have to mix and merge till the end of the journey.

This nightmare of Indian railways journey in an unreserved compartment may be primarily due to the huge crowd of passengers which is characteristic of any over-populated territory. There is the preponderance of an underprivileged, ill-fed and ignoramus segment of population among the railway commuters. They would hijack any little solace you might be enjoying by having evoked yourself the most sane and sanguine temperament in you. In a scene of free for all, around you, and often on you, they would be indulging in the entire spectrum of activities that bipeds are capable of. They would indulge in vitriolic feuds, vociferous political debates, and midway through, peel and eat fruits, drink beverages, chew tobacco and spit over your shoulder and partly on you and hit at your silhouette unmindfully in the process. All along, you will be smoking the cocktail of fumes emanating from country cigars enjoyed by your compatriots around you.