My father wouldn’t have retired too early, six years before he was supposed to be 60, had there been even a proposal of extending the Metro to Barasat, as it was declared yesterday by a lady known to be maverick in nature, confused in philosophy and restless in work.
This piece is not to celebrate the ideas and ideals of Mamata Banerjee — as has been the case in the public sphere since her party’s meteoric rise to popularity in the past few months — but to share a few thoughts with you as a fellow commuter on the infamous Sealdah-Bongaon section.
Why infamous? Isn’t it derogatory? Obviously, it is.
How many of you have got only a square feet to make yourself comfortable in a place on a EMU compartment in the peak hours? I still have to do on most of the occasions. For me, the rush office hours are better than the semi-full compartments in the afternoons, when I travel nowadays to come to office. The logic is simple: you don’t need to be extra-cautious for your belongings in the office hours than lazy afternoons, when unemployed youths get active to pounce upon innocent passengers, especially women travelling alone. Although I broke my first (or, second) specs of my life on a morning train at Barasat while going to school, I still enjoy the crowd.
The crowd, in the morning office hours, is just superb. While some of them are busy playing cards on the 30/45-minute journey, many others enjoy arguing the Mamata-Buddha political equation, talking about the late night cricket match in West Indies or even the usual soccer duel between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal. I still think the commuters have a better feel of things than the intellectuals or bureaucrats chalking out strategies sitting far from the reality in an AC room!
Once I told my father — before he gave up commuting, which he started in the early Sixties when he was a student at Ashutosh College in Calcutta, in 1998 — that the best intellectuals are the people who take the morning crowded trains to office and repeat the same in evenings. Even now, I can see unknown faces talking to each other on issues like the Indo-US nuclear deal, Iran elections or even Obama’s Afpak policy. It might sound strange to a stranger to Bongaon locals, but it’s true. All you need is proper initiation before your first step inside the bogie. Otherwise you might be shoved just like my big fat maternal uncle. In short, he was told to make room for another person in a cramped compartment he was not habituated to travel!
Somehow, I still prefer train journeys to any other mode of transport. Not because it’s smoother and safer than the rest, but also for its positive impact on the environment. It’s still one of the green public transports available to us — maybe in the mode of a symbolic green EMU rakes to us! Bongaon locals are not infamous as it seems to be, they are really nice to travel on, an experience of lifetime.
©Supratim Pal, 2009
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