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...