Ouchmytoe.com – An Indian's Funny Blog

It isn’t without reason that Railways has a separate budget. No, it isn’t because Mamta Banerjee wanted to have her own purse. It is because Railways is an integral part of the Indian psyche, not to mention the amount of money spent on its daily up keep and the number of passengers it helps move every day.

I have traveled in trains from 1976, when as a chubby one-year old we shifted from Jamshedpur to Jhallandar (father being in the Indian Army), to my recent trip to Kerala which happened like…yesterday. In the earlier days, we used to travel for four days in steam engines, all the while covered in soot, to reach our destination. We would take bath mid-way through our journey (sometimes a quick bath in the second class waiting rooms & sometimes a shaky bath in the train’s washroom) but the pleasure lasted only a few hours for we would be covered in soot again. Being a dark South Indian family, this didn’t affect us much….but I shudder to think of the mental anguish the fair North Indian families had to undergo in such trains. Back in those days it wasn’t hard to spot North Indian families with a bit of sense of humor, ask the kids traveling with them racist questions like: “What? Now, you have become a South Indian?” More often than not, the kid would cry himself to sleep.
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