Musings on a train journey

I love long, solitary train journeys. Doing nothing at all to reach some destination is in itself an exciting promise for any journey. But the Indian rails have a life of their own. People stretch out in varying degrees of comfort as a train leaves every major station. Families chat as if they never meet each other in their own homes. Someone's bad taste in music is absorbed by the sound of the moving train. The tea vendors and the local food produce sellers punctuate any continued activity in the moving caravan. Nothing is ever still inside, and yet, there is a synchronization to all that drama.

The scene outside is totally different. Everything is still. The afternoons, especially, are like a series of pictures in some ambitious exhibition. The geography changes as the train moves. The crops, the rivers, the housing patterns, people and their dresses- the train cuts into the picture and merges into it seamlessly. And then it all starts moving. Every single thing rooted in its spot since years is granted agency. The hurried conversations as they all move are no different than the scattered ones inside.

The beauty of all this is that everything else moves, and you stay where you are- dreamy and drowsy. A narcissistic pleasure that the world is working to take you somewhere while you do nothing is worth all the hours you supposedly waste in that long train journey.