As the temperature soured past the 40 degree mark and the man and his wife sitting next to me had just managed to conquer another quarter of my seat, I sat there hopelessly frustrated about not having an eject button and a jet pack on me to escape this insanely infuriating situation I was in. That man perhaps felt like he was 17yr old Alexander the great trying to conquer the world as he skillfully took over my seat inch by inch thereby making more room for his lazy wife to spread her legs and sleep and in the process almost successfully pushed me into the aisle. At the end of that exercise I was supporting my ass with one leg, one inch of seat and a lot of air!
But the truth of the matter was that sitting on air was far more comfortable than sitting on that seat which had a cushion that was skillfully crafted to feel a little harder than the steel frame that supported it. Talent is’t it? This is only one of those many rare talents that Indian Railways has not just developed but also mastered during its last 157 years of existence. Some of its other talents include designing fans that rotate at high speeds and yet don’t give any air and even more amazingly monopolizing train travel in a vast land where it is the only medium of transport for over 90% of its population and yet making loses for 153 of the 157 yrs of its existence !
If that was not remarkable enough, there is more to it. Here is a train which is one among eight trains that shuttle between the two most developed cities of South India everyday but yet looks like it was year 1947 and this was the last train to Pakistan. It is loaded to at least thrice its capacity i.e. excluding the business travelers. Business travelers here does not infer an elite class of travel or a bunch of corporate honchos on their way to a board meeting. But it instead refers to a unique segment of the Indian economy that thrives in the second class compartments of Indian trains. The aisle almost transforms into a mobile ranganadhan street. There is nothing really you cannot buy here, from pirated DVDs to nursery workbooks you can get them all.Giving the passengers a travel experience that even luxury trains have not been able to provide.
If all this still leaves some space to walk , it is rightfully occupied by the community that is easily the single largest majority in a country of such grave diversity, the beggers. They come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from a couple of days old infants to 100 not out senior citizens. Men, woman and the third sex. This is perhaps the only profession where the third sex not only get a fair representation but also enjoy being market leaders. You better be ready with some bucks to give them unless you belong to the rare species of people who actually enjoy being licked, cajoled and seduced by a eunuch in public. If you still insist not to budge you better be prepared for some horrific XXX entertainment at your own risk and loose your mental peace for the rest of your life as that horrific image flashes every time you close your eyes then on.
In short a train in India is its mini eco-system on the move. Except for a small glitch, the train reservation mechanism is yet to be influenced by the other reservation mechanism that rules this country. We can perhaps hope to see that taking place once Arjun Singh becomes our next railway minister. But it will be
Interesting to see if at least that reservation applies to our business travelers and beggars as well.
By now the train had lazily covered one half of the 7 hour long journey to Bangaluru and I was just about half dead. So the balance seems to be impeccable. By the time I reach my destination I should be finished I thought. I started desperately looking around for some alternative methods of killing time as I was too bored of analyzing the people around me by then. I decided to fight boredom with music. Thought it would be the best way to make my awful situation a little better. Desperate for something to sooth my ear after listening to all the jarring noise from the grumbling train and the support chorus from its passengers, I wore my ear plugs and played some music from my cell phone. I was hardly 10 minutes into listening when I realized A R Rahman was not in the kind of magical touch he used to be at one time and that frustrated me more than the train, my neighbor , the fan, the seat and all the beggars put together ! I started growing even more restless and desperate. I punched my hand into my bag and started moving it all over to catch hold of something that could be my accomplice in killing time.
It was at this time that I got my hands on a book. A novel that I had bought just the previous day in anticipation of the disaster that was to follow today but had forgotten about it in my state of frustration. I pulled it out like I had just found Bill Gates’s credit card. It was a yellow black book and the cover read “The 3 mistakes of my life” by Chetan Bhagat . At that moment to find a book which on its very first page proclaimed that its author had already made three big mistakes in his life while I had made just one (boarding the train that is) was nothing less than a million orgasms. Excited and thrilled at the same time I started reading through the book. There are few things in this world that can match the excitement of finding someone who you know for a fact is a bigger looser than you.
The next two hours were killed quite effortlessly with the lethal book that I had found. By then I had realized that the one leg that was supporting my rather large body had become num. Five and a half hours of sitting still in an awkward position can num even certain parts of a woman’s body that are otherwise quite sensitive. It was crying for some movement (I mean my leg ;-). That was when I took a major decision in my life, to actually plough through the human mass that separated me from the restroom that was just 10 mts away in distance but considering the travel complexity was almost half a universe away. But the governing law of the universe is “necessity is the mother of all fuck-ups”.
And this was just yet another variation of it.
I gathered all the mental and physical strength I could and set out on this voyage within the voyage. After a grueling 10 minutes of walking on people and squeezing through some odd bulks of mass I reached my destination. No, not Bengaluru but the obnoxious little toilet at the end of the compartment. The expression on my face when I entered the toilet was the same as that of Ali Baba's when he entered his cave of treasures.
The thrill of reaching the toilet dint last a second after I entered it. I was horrified by what I saw. I had just discovered the only part of the train which offered a bi-directional view of the world. You heard me right, a passenger in the toilet can actually enjoy both the usual side view and also a rather unusual bottom view !!!! In other words the world’s largest railways still had the world’s most out dated human waste disposal mechanism!!!!
That sight had more impact on me than what a cover page of a playboy magazine could have aspired to achieve. It threw open a pandora’s box full of questions in my head. To the extent that I never even realized I had already ploughed through the human mass to reach my seat and meanwhile even the train had managed to touch Bengaluru City ! For the next two days my head was running a slide show of these agonizing images and therby forcing me to give this some thought .
If this is still the state of this organization, then what is all this buzz about the historic turnaround of the Indian railways by the great Lalu Prasad Yadav all about?, I thought. Did he travel all the way to Harvard on this pretext just to brag about how his organization “historically” made one million Indians shit on railway tracks every day ???? Is this the kind of service India’s now second highest profit making PSU provided to its 6 billion travellers with its 1.6 million strong employee strength which is more than the number of people required to run a nation, let alone running this inefficient railway system.
This is in-efficiency at its best, I quipped. The very fact that it took an uneducated milkman politician from Bihari heart land to turn this hugely loss making enterprise into a profit making one speaks volumes of its in-efficiency. I obviously do understand it is easier said than done to run an organization of this scale. Its in many ways like riding on a wild dinosaur, too difficult to control and maneuver but once you get it oriented in the right direction the impact of the success will be un imaginable. If a failed chief minister of India’s most backward state can churn out 16 billion dollars in revenue from it in just one year what could a Mukesh Ambani do to it ??
This success was not achieved by the managerial ingenuity of the railway administration but by simply piggy-backing on the booming Indian economy. Had there been some efficient governing coupled with these other factors, its success would have been far more profound. These facts kept gonging in my head and raised a trickle of hope for this god foresaken organization.
All is not over yet, I optimistically look forward to the days when this “goldmine” of an enterprise is run in true corporate style. With its 6 Billion strong and still growing customer base and wealthy employee and capital strength this sleeping giant can give any of the fortune 500 companies a run for its money !
.JPG)
0 comments:
Post a Comment