Railways and Change in India

"Wow, Indian railways have improved beyond all recognition!", I thought as the Deccan Express pulled out of Pune junction. I was travelling by train after more than twenty years.  

Why such a long gap? Air travel had become a regular habit for domestic travel anywhere in India. And for my more regular travels between Pune and Mumbai, there is the 6-lane expressway which, ever since its completion in the late 1990s, has cut a 5-hour laborious and dangerous road journey to a 3-hour fast-paced commute. 

But now the expressway is getting overcrowded, while on the other hand the railways have been earning good press. So after reading about yet another traffic jam on the Pune-Mumbai expressway, I had decided to try the train. 

And what a fabulous experience it had been so far! A smooth and fast booking process via an app on my phone. A text message from the railways the day before the journey, letting me know my seat and coach number. A much, much cleaner station and platform from what I had experienced 20 years ago. Escalators to help you get across to your platform. A beautiful new "vistadome" coach with large windows and comfortable seats. Clean washrooms that were no longer "open-to-ground", and with working flushes! And most of all, the train that had left the platform at the exact scheduled time of departure. 

My fellow passengers in the vistadome coach seemed to be of two types. One, the tourist or leisure traveller variety - relaxed, chatting and joking, and keen to try whatever snacks the railway vendors were selling (and there was a vast variety of offerings! ) And two, the business traveller variety - there were many of them, busy on their emails or work calls (And the work conversations were as jarringly loud as the phone calls the tourists were making - confidentiality is not something that many Indians care much about!)

The train carriage and its passengers, in fact, were a representation of the new India that is making waves across the world - prosperous, confident, world-class in many respects, while also being brash and noisy. Everyone was caught up in their own tasks as the train passed through the first few stations in the Pune suburbs. 

Suddenly, there was a jerk and the train came to a dead halt. We had just passed through Dapodi station and half the train was still adjoining the platform while the other half had gone beyond it. 

The passengers in the vistadome coach were unconcerned, wrapped up in their various phone calls, food and conversations. After fifteen minutes of the train being stationary, I went to the doorway to see what was happening. A crowd was gathered on the platform looking underneath the train. Some of the train catering staff had alighted from the train and were also standing there, watching. There seemed to be something caught under the train. 

One of the passengers from the vistadome.coach came back from the crowd. 

"A couple has thrown themselves under the train as it was passing the station " he announced loudly and matter-of-factly. "The woman is dead, the man is alive and they are trying to get them out". 

The passengers in the coach murmured a little. Oh no! Not nice. How inconvenient! How much of a delay could this potentially cause? I wondered whether it would have been wiser to just go by road, instead of making this train experiment. 

But evidently the railways knew how to deal quickly with this situation. A main line with a hundred trains a day, cannot be kept stopped for too long. Within ten minutes, the train started moving again. The food vendors resumed their walk through the carriages, while the passengers continued with their chats, took pictures and selfies, and carried on with their work calls. All was well.

Or was it? Outside the bubble of well-being in the air-conditioned, sparkling-clean vistadome coach, someone had reached such depths of despair in their lives that they felt ending it all was their only option. Who can say, what this unfortunate couple had been going through! 

And what of the reaction of the passengers - myself included amongst them. I had experienced irritation, mild curiosity and shock, dread at the prospect of a long delay, and then relief once the train got moving. In my mind there had been very little room for empathy, sadness or any desire to help. 

The train made up most of the time lost, and reached Mumbai only ten minutes late. I spoke to a friend on the phone. "The train is fantastic, our railways have improved so much! But we had a small delay en route, because someone decided to use the rail track as a suicide point! Some things don't change, Ha Ha Ha!"

Indeed, some things don't change...

Mumbai v. Maharashtra and twists in the Ranji Trophy tale

 Supremacy in Indian domestic cricket is determined by who wins the Ranji Trophy. Thanks to regular changes made to the format, the tournament has stayed relevant and interesting since its inception in 1935. We see twists and turns in every tournament of every sport, and the Ranji Trophy has its share of them. But what happened last week will take some beating! 

To summarise, there was a group stage match between two heavyweight teams Mumbai and Maharashtra, with the winner almost sure to go ahead to the quarterfinals. But their match ended in a nail-biting dead heat. And as a result, both adversaries were overtaken in the points table, and knocked out of the tournament, by a third team- Andhra Pradesh (which had earlier been comprehensively beaten by both of these aforesaid heavyweights!) 

Firstly, some historical context - Mumbai is the capital of Maharashtra state, but we have two different teams named Mumbai and Maharashtra that play domestic cricket. Mumbai comprises players from the greater Mumbai area, while Maharashtra comprises players from Pune and all of western Maharashtra. (Players from eastern Maharashtra represent Vidarbha, which is a great team as well). Mumbai are the erstwhile superpower of Indian cricket. For decades, everyone else played second fiddle to Mumbai in national tournaments while in the West Zone, the Maharashtra team usually came off second-best against their neighbours Mumbai. 

But the past two decades have seen big changes in Indian domestic cricket. Other teams have caught up, and some have overtaken Mumbai. These days, Mumbai are "one of the strong teams", looking for a way back to the top. Maharashtra have been doing well for years, without quite scaling the final frontier of winning the Ranji Trophy. 

This year's Ranji tournament saw teams placed in groups. Teams in each group were to play all others in a round-robin format,  with the top 2 from the group qualifying for the quarterfinals. Maharashtra and Mumbai were drawn in the same group along with other big-name teams like Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Saurashtra. 

The points format was geared to encourage teams to go for a win - 

• Win - 6 points 
• Dominating Win - (by an innings, or by 10 wickets) - 1 extra bonus point, 7 in total
• Take First-Innings lead in a drawn match - 3 points 
• Concede First-Innings lead in a drawn match - 1 point
• No-result - 1 point to each team

If teams were tied with the same number of points at end of the group stage, the team with more bonus-point wins would get a higher standing. 

When the last round of group matches began, the top 3 teams in the group were placed this way -

• Saurashtra 26 points
• Maharashtra 25 points
• Mumbai 23 points

And Andhra Pradesh was some way behind with 19 points. 

Saurashtra had made it through to the quarterfinals regardless of their final round match result, because they had some bonus-point wins. Maharashtra hadn't lost a single match, but hadn't picked up any bonus-point wins either. And Mumbai had lost a few games, but also picked up some bonus-point wins. 

 The Maharashtra versus Mumbai game was thus billed by the media as a virtual pre-quarterfinal. Whoever got the best of the game would qualify for the quarterfinals. Obviously, an outright win would put the winner through. If the game was drawn and if Mumbai had the first-innings lead, they would draw level with Maharashtra on points, and go ahead because of more bonus points. If Mumbai conceded the first-innings lead, Maharashtra would cruise through into the quarterfinals. 

The two teams were evenly matched with a mix of internationals, domestic stalwarts and upcoming stars. Former India test captain Ajinkya Rahane led Mumbai with young stars like Armaan Jaffer, Suved Parkar and Shams Mulani; while Maharashtra were led by former India A player Ankit Bawne and had stars like former international Kedar Jadhav and all-rounder Azim Kazi. 

The game started. Maharashtra went it to bat first and with Kedar Jadhav scoring a century, ended their innings at 384. Not a bad score, but certainly not unreachable! 

Mumbai began their reply on the second day of the game, aiming for the first innings lead.  Maharashtra were up for the fight - their bowlers kept making breakthroughs and Mumbai ended the day at 180 for 5. The next day, Mumbai continued to push ahead but kept losing wickets. With Mumbai  8 down for 341, Maharashtra had the game under control - but young Mumbai batsman Tanush Kotian didn't give up and kept the score inching forward.  Mumbai lost their 9th wicket as well, but the last-wicket batsman somehow managed to keep his end up. A dozen runs were added and Mumbai reached 384 - with Kotian still batting! 

The scores of both teams were level. Mumbai were on the cusp of taking the lead, but Kotian was bowled off the next ball! In the 88 years and 2,000+ matches of the Ranji Trophy, this was only the 10th time that both teams finished their first innings tied at the same score. 

According to the rules, if the game was drawn without any team getting the first-innings lead, each team would be awarded 1 point. This could have still worked for Maharashtra, but there was terrible news for them from another of the group matches. Andhra Pradesh, who had been beaten comfortably by both Maharashtra and Mumbai earlier in the group games, had won their last game with a day to spare and gained a bonus-point as well!

Andhra were now ahead of both Mumbai and Maharashtra in the points table. Both teams now faced elimination, unless their game produced a result and someone got the 6 points! 

Mumbai and Maharashtra now had to go for a win - starting the second innings with just a day and a bit remaining in the game. Apart from the mental and physical exhaustion of the nail-biting first innings, the news from the Andhra game must have come as a further shock. Nevertheless, the two sets of gladiators set out grimly to fight the game to a finish.

Mumbai had the upper hand initially, knocking half the Maharashtra side out for seventy-odd runs. But the steel in the Maharashtra team showed through, and they fought their way to 252. 

With time running out, Mumbai now needed to score 253 in 28 overs to win - almost a T20 scenario. Rahane's team made a fast start, hitting out from the first over. Bawne, for his part, wanted the 10 Mumbai wickets - he was more than happy to set attacking fields, compelling the Mumbai batsmen to take risks if they wanted runs.

Mumbai scored quickly, while Maharashtra took wickets. Mumbai had lost 6 wickets by the time they scored 150 runs, still more than a hundred runs away from the target. But both teams now ran out of time, and the game ended in an exceptionally exciting draw.

Two strong and capable teams were thus knocked out of the Ranji Trophy at the group stage.  

The Andhra captain, Indian test player Hanuma Vihari,  had tweeted an end-of-tournament message after winning their last group game the previous day, expressing how gutted he was at being knocked out, but how proud he was of his teammates, how well they fought, et cetera... and Vihari now speedily deleted it and replaced with a two-word tweet simply saying "Quarter finals!!!" 

Meanwhile Rahane, Bawne and the rest of the Mumbai and Maharashtra teams reflected on "what might have been"!! 

Plenty of morals of the story! The two  I choose to go with are 

•  Don't think that your immediate adversary is the only problem you have. Someone you completely overlooked and underestimated, can come out of nowhere and hammer you! 

But more importantly - 

• All sports, at all levels, are exciting to follow :-)