Train Diaries

After one week of getting up really really late, eating piles of paranthas and having enormous amount of dairy products, it was time to leave home and get back to Delhi for the next semester. The feeling was akin to that in some stories that i had read as a child about the boy going to his boarding school and the relatives seeing him off at the station. This was the first time that,due to my father's transfer, my home is so far from my hostel...in Ahmedabad. Nevertheless , the three heavy suitcases were enough to occupy my mind and i said goodbye to my parents.

Gone baby gone...
As much as i like babies..one 'side-effect' of the AC compartment is that whenever you have a child traveling and sitting somewhere close to you, along with his mother..the results are irritating.
In a normal sleeper coach the noises and commotion from all different sources, chai wala, frooti wala..or the train itself,drown the noises that i pretty much dont like to hear too clearly.
So unfortunately, for a large part of journey i got to hear.."No ! Rahul, No..!!", "Do not disturb uncle ", "No..beta upar mat jao..!" , " Chot lag jayegi " , " Kapde gande mat karo !! " etc. etc. He didn't let his mother(or me) sleep continuosly for more than 20 min with once waking her up to ask "time kya hua hai ?" and the poor lady concentrated in the dark to tell him the time and when asked why was he asking he just said "aise hi". All this seemed to me , nothing less than a conspiracy against the mother, as no one deserves to be treated this bad !
But luckily they got off at Jaipur and it was nothing less than heaven from there on.

InDecent-ry
I've always thought that people are more interested in having conversations with fellow passengers in trains than in any other mode of transportation and to an extent i am also open to it. But this time, a bihari couple was sitting across me , who had been in Gujarat for the first time and had their "voily gujarati food". And in conversation with another passenger , the uncle said , "..pet gadbada gaya humara. Ab thoda theek hai warna aaj subah tak to bahut badhiya 'dysentery' ho gaya tha ". The Outlook magazine that i had bought turned out to be even more useful as i dug deeper into it , to pretend that i was not present there.