RailEnquiry

Imagine if someone offered a service that enabled you to switch off from the world for two or three days. The service - let's call it Undulating Cocoon Therapy - would put you in an air-conditioned chamber with a simple bunk bed for anything from 24 to 36 hours, with no one and nothing to disturb you, with food coming at regular intervals, and a screen next to the bed that projected blurred, soothing images of an ever-changing landscape. In this cocoon you could sleep, read or daydream. If absolutely necessary, you could make notes in a notebook or play with your (nonnet connected) laptop. Every now and then this cocoon would vibrate, shake around a bit, so that you felt linked to the earth; the vibrations would also help you sleep, massaging your back gently as you traversed your dreams.

At the end of your chosen length of time in this interaction/ information vipasana, you would come out rejuvenated, raring to go, hungry for whatever challenges your normal existence wished to throw at you. This being a spartan republic, the chamber is something you would share with three other like- minded people, and the four bathrooms (not far from your chamber) you would share with, at the max, say another fifteen people. Say the whole thing cost only Rs.3,400 for a 26 hour slot, plus, say, another 200-300 bucks for food and beverages. Say alcohol and smoking were forbidden, but let's say the company providing the service was working on how this could be overcome.

Phenomenon

I don't know about you, but I would take it. In fact, barring the last bit of wishful thinking in the paragraph above, I have just taken it. It can't be my place to advertise the Indian Railways, especially not at this juncture when the Railway Minister, the CEO of the largest organisation in the world, seems to see fit to spend most of his time in one side- corner of the vast territory of which he's been given charge.

However, ministers come and go, like mail trains in the night, but the Indian Railways roll on majestically through our lives, and I have to extol the attractions of the cross-country chhuk-chhuk journey, especially in 1st AC which costs the half of most airline tickets.

I suppose the long train journey across India is hard-wired into my middle-middle-class Indian soul, belonging as I do to the generation that passed its childhood looking at jetplanes mostly from the ground.

Whereas my kids (who live in a different culture) quail at the thought of anything more than four hours in a train, for me a train ride remains insubstantial if it doesn't involve sleeping at least one night in a shifting, sliding, bouncing berth. When the offspring complain, I try and do the physiological math for them: getting up at unearthly hours to haul yourself to the airport; the soul-less check-ins, the endless security snakes and hanging about the departure gates; the dreadful feeling of being in an out of control mountainbus, except that this bus is twisting on a road 38,000 feet above the ground; at the other end, the dangers of the luggage conveyor-belt ('Look pappa, that kid just got swallowed! Oh, look! Now he's come out as a little soft suitcase!') and then the wobble in the knees and the popping in the ears as the human body tries, over the next few days, to uninstall the two to three hours (or eight or nine) of torture-suspension in a pressurised tube hurtling across a demi-vacuum.

I know I'll never be able to convey the love-hate, the thrill-horror generated when taking the Nagpur Mail from Calcutta to Bombay in the 60s and 70s. I always thought of it as 'three days on the train' when it was only ever two nights sandwiching a long day in the middle. I used to read a lot of Westerns in those days, and the start at Howrah would always feel like we were pioneers embarking on the wagon trail. Along the way we would run the gauntlet of many Hostiles, brown if not red Indians of different savage tribes, Oriyas, Biharis, UP-wallas, Madhya Pradeshis and, finally, the most dangerous, the Ghaati-Apachees with their deadly, world- destroying weapon, the Marathi tea which forever lay in ambush Nagpur onwards, through the gulch at Nasik Road and the ravine at Igatpuri.

In those days, the cocoon was the old, classic, non-airconditioned First Class with its open windows and the jestercompany of ceiling fans, each telling different jokes at different speeds to help one pass the time. The first night would come quickly, soon after the fresh food from home was put into the processor.

Journey

The morning would dawn, with negotiations between my parents about which tea from which station platform, and the water from home, carried in a fat water-dispenser, already being hoarded. As the day passed, the food supply from home would diminish, leading to emergency supplements of nourriture from the hostiles: forked- oil pakodas, bear-trap puri-alu, tomahawk-samosas, all bought with much haggling. Afternoons meant Glucose biscuits munched over comics or an adventure book. As the heat rose and the soot flew in from the steam engine, parents would sleep while the kid travelled far- flung foreign worlds. In the meantime, the train barged through forests that would, in three decades' time, shelter real Red Indians in the shape of Maoists. Come evening, the last of the home food would be brought out and harnessed with the vegetable cutlets and tumatosup provided by the train catering. Come the second dawn, we would be twisting through the ghats, boring into tunnels, the lethal tea waiting patiently for us at the stations of Maharashtra. At about 8am, the train would pull into VT, delivering us from the purgatory that was the Republic of India, moving us from the non-India of Calcutta to the non-India of Bombay.

Change

The recent train ride I took was very different from those early journeys. Forget the fantasy of being suspended from the world, we were all on mobile phones with pretty good connectivity throughout, and the other two passenger parties were armed with dongles that kept them web-connected for most of the time we made our way around the Bay of Bengal. On the other hand, there was none of the contact you used to feel with the passing countryside and certainly none of the exchange with the people on the platforms - one of the most fascinating parts during the old, open- window trips. What connected for me, however, was that this train thing still had the potential to subvert our daily Pavlovian response to time, our default modes of dividing our days, dedicating sectors to the demands of the world and the demands we make of ourselves, parcelling out precious slivers of time for ourselves, allowing hardly any minute or hour to lie fallow, to let the ground of our life breathe, mulch and rejuvenate.

I don't know if the current or any future Railway Minister will take up the idea of the Undulating Cocoon, but what I do know is we need it badly, the concept that every now and then we need to switch off, just as we need to sleep every day, and that the long Indian train journey, with a couple of tweaks, might just be what the doctor hasn't yet seen fit to order.