Indian Railway Journey

If you are in an emergency and you cannot obtain reservation for your journey in the Indian railway, you will experience not just nightmare but simply hell while being alive and breathing on this beautiful planet. Tourists who travel without reservation are destined to survive in the unreserved compartments. It is a cattle-class virtually and hordes of commuters are herded into the compartments where you have to breathe out into the nostrils of your companion. This may be an over-simplification of the milieu in which under-privileged and ill-fated citizenry is packed like sardines sans ‘breathing-space’. Leaving the sardonic vein, when viewed in a “brutally positive” perspective, this whole violence, sound and fury of an Indian railway journey is an efficacious ‘exercise in national integration’. Here the catholicity of Indian populace consisting of the myriad of cultural, linguistic and regional identities fret and fume, sweat and swear and in the process have to mix and merge till the end of the journey.

Indian railway journey is a nightmare if viewed in a realistic perspective. The problems are due to multiple reasons characteristic of any heavily-populated developing economy. The agonies of commuters destined to travel in unreserved compartments are all the more harrowing. The compartments will be over-crowded and often thick-packed. The bulk of the traveling population is under-privileged and under-educated and they indulge in all actions of creature comforts and thus adding to the agony of all.