ON TRACK…NO, WAIT! WHAT?!... I MEAN RAILWAY TRACK

Hey!!.... So, finally I’m back… Well, it’s been almost a year since I last updated this blog. That is, without a doubt, a pretty long drought but I had way too many other commitments you see, although I won’t deny the fact that I am one big, lazy bum. Anyway, now that I’m back, here’s a promise. So long as there are ideas that continue to provoke thought and inspire me, I will find a way to keep this blog alive.

So getting to what brings me back… Recently, when I was returning from my sister’s wedding in Chennai, as soon as I reached the station, I immediately rushed to my bogie, deposited the suitcase in the luggage rack, and rushed out to see the locomotive. As I was rushing out, one of my relatives came up to me and asked if I didn’t find it odd that I was still doing this despite having grown up. This question forced me to think – what does it really mean to ‘grow up’? Somehow, trains have always fascinated me since a young age. I still remember as a kid growing up in Bombay how I used to visit the Matunga station everyday. My mom used to come back from work in the evening and the first thing she would do was to take me to the station. It used to almost be like a ritual. My day wasn’t complete until I walked into the station and watched a couple of trains chug past. There is something about trains that mesmerize me. Even to this day, and I’m not ashamed to admit this.. But even today when I’m walking past a railway track and see a train approaching, I stop dead in my tracks, watch it go past, and only then continue moving. Why? When I get bored at home with nothing to do, I quickly take the car out and go for a drive to the railway station. Just spending an hour over there, memorizing the time-table and going through the schedule is so refreshing. It gives me immense pleasure.

I see so many people everyday who tell me that they travel by flight because they lack the time or the patience to travel by train. But, if you ask me, there is no greater joy than a train journey. A train journey gives the real feel of travelling. It gets you into the travel mode as you slowly take in the beauty of the outside surroundings as it whizzes past the towns and the forests, unlike a flight journey which is just a few minutes or hours of senseless, lifeless travel. If I were to go from Bangalore to Chennai in a flight, I would go in, put on my seat belt. The flight takes off and I’m offered a cup of tea and before I can relish the drink and finish it, we are already preparing for landing. It doesn’t even sink in that I’m travelling to another town for a holiday. Whereas a train takes its own, sweet time. The excitement of going to another town, meeting family and friends after a long time, there is plenty of time to think of all this. And this excitement only makes the journey more pleasurable, more beautiful.

But, unfortunately, people have become too busy for all this. A flight journey is quick and simple, just the way we like things to be. In this never-ending race and quest for money, power, fame, and glory, we have forgotten what it means to take in the simple joys of life. People have forgotten what happiness truly means. Happiness is now defined in monetary terms. Hell, we now live in a world where even happiness has become monetized. Well, I for one certainly wouldn’t mind sparing time for a train journey. If it takes 40 hours from Bangalore to Delhi through train, then so be it. It’s certainly worth the time and the money. Every time I travel by train, I make it a point to go and check out the locomotive. It somehow bothers me and I almost feel guilty if I don’t do it. I get restless and my journey feels incomplete. Well, it just gives me some kind of joy doing it and I don’t see anything wrong with that. I don’t think I owe anybody an explanation for doing it and justify my sometimes-childish actions as a grown person. If this is what maturity means, if growing up means forgetting the simple joys of life and sacrificing what makes you happy, then go ahead and call me a kid. Because its these ‘silly’ things that make life complete. Its such simple pleasures that make life so beautiful. It’s the joy that you derive from such things that make life worth living. Its the choice we make that defines our lives, or it is, as my blog title suggests, “Life the way I see it”….