Subir Roy: Discover India by rail

OFFBEAT/ Let airplanes take care of progress

Corruption, spitting in public places and jumping queues are common traits that undoubtedly keep India together. But people need to meet each other to keep bonding and reinforcing common traits.

The Sardarji truck driver carries the goods. The airlines carry the burra sahibs, both public and private sector varieties. For the vast majority of the rest of us, it is the railways that enable Indians to keep meeting fellow Indians and remain a single nation.

Technology has kept pace with this. Time was when getting one set of reservations was tough, but getting another set to go on the second leg of a long journey or the return journey was a stupendous task. Not any more.

The computers that run the passenger reservation system have defied the Indian ability to render dysfunctional anything that can become dysfunctional. They keep functioning day after day, year after year, with a wholly non-Indian efficiency.

It wasn't always as easy to do a long journey by rail. Hence, such a journey was a big event, requiring long planning, an equally long exchange of letters with the hosts at the other end and packing suitcases "" if not trunks "" full of clothes.

And as D-day approached, the women of the household would spend long hours in the kitchen, packing enormous meals in massive tiffin carriers for the family to keep itself going during the long journey.

It is not as if the journey was particularly arduous, but there was something in the repetitive, beautifully monotonous, swaying rattley-tat of the speeding train that gave you an enormous appetite.

You could, of course, buy snacks off the hawkers, but the fun of going on an extended picnic, which a long train journey was akin to, was gone if there were no tiffin carriers and the delicious stuff that went into it.

The produce of the home kitchen was mostly gone after the first day's journey and the subsequent days of journey offered the opportunity to savour the stuff dished out at the stations where the train stopped.

In family discourses over which part of the railways or which line was better or worse, the main line between Howrah and Delhi usually came up trumps. That was because the food available en route was better there than on other lines.

The chord line linked the same two points over a shorter distance, requiring less journey time, but it was never popular because the food along it was not as good. And as for the food on the line to Madras, the less said the better.

Those were the days when the taste of idli-dosa had not become familiar across the country and the Bengali palate, which preferred everything deep-fried, saw the journey down to the deep south as not the most appetising.

Modernisation of sorts came to the railways with the advent of the Delhi-Howrah Rajdhani around the 1970s. My first visit to Delhi was by the Janata Express that arrived several hours late and took what seemed like days. The return was by Rajdhani. The chair car fare was a right royal Rs 70-odd.

The lasting memory of it was the severity of the airconditioning. It was so effective that, unable to sleep, I went and stood in the corridor and kept stomping. The shivering night was made up by a beautiful morning that began with shehnai music through the public address system and an announcement that the train was running on time.

The high-speed Rajdhani meant progress but I was soon clear that sitting cooped up for even less than 20 hours took the fun out of rail travel. I soon gravitated back to the Kalka Mail, which had lost its pre-eminence with the arrival of the Rajdhani. But what it allowed you to do was get off at stations and savour the local flavours and smells.

It was a rediscovery that a rail journey was more than simply getting from one place to another. It was also saying hello to some of the places in-between. It was taking in the change in dress and language as a train travelled across the country and took in new passengers.

In recent times, the inter-city Shatabdi trains have sought to take a part of the upmarket business traffic between points where air links are poor or non-existent. Luxury buses, however, still continue to pose stiff competition and the Shatabdi trains are not a winning proposition for the railways.

That is not surprising because the railways were never business-savvy. Depending on how bad the incumbent railway minister has been, the national carrier has swayed from poor to not-so-poor performance.

As far as passenger traffic goes, it is doubtful if the salvation of the railways lies in pursuing the business or well-heeled traveller. I rather like to think of it as an aid to national discovery. If you want to get to know the country and reflect on its infinite variety, you should take a train "" the slower the better "" to the back of beyond.

And the biggest bonus is when such a train makes an unscheduled stop at an utterly unknown little station where the surrounding country walks right up to the platform and the railways staff look as if they will go back to their fields as soon as the train has been dispatched.

A good part of the custom for this kind of railway service can come from tourists, both domestic and foreign. The Eurail pass is such an asset in discovering Europe at your own pace.

The similar offering by the Indian railways can be improved and imaginatively marketed. If even most Indians are unaware of the great nature and heritage discoveries they can make by travelling on rails, then that is the opportunity.

The railways cannot entirely sustain itself on the romantic discovery of India. So there can be a compromise. Let the railways get highly commercial and market savvy on freight.

To passengers looking for swanky, fast trains, my reply is to ask them to look elsewhere. I want the railways to do what they do best: keep the country together; not by simply improving transportation but aiding the discovery of India.