Ever wondered how poetic the train journey could become?
Where there is rhythm, harmony beauty, time for being imaginative one cannot but help being poetic.
We gather many types of weird feelings during Rail travel. We sometimes get involved with a co-passenger's family, play with their children, eat their food and share ours with them, discuss politics, music literature this and that and later even go along with them carrying their luggage to help them alight from the train. We exchange phone numbers with a promise to keep touch. The heart gets filled with a kind of new energy leading to some kind of self-fulfillment or whatever you may call.
It is alright if you get into conversation with some one or keep yourself engaged with, may be, your mobile, iPod or laptop or book or whatever. But when you sit down to brood. It is another matter. Brooding while the landscape on your view passes one after the other making the fields in your sight appear twisted and then disappearing - My God!, what a feeling!. Only the one who has experienced this knows how it feels. We may safely say, train travel is not just taking an individual from one location to another, it also transports him from one level to another.
Once, while I was in a Management Development Programme of State Bank of India(SBI) at its Gurukul at Gurgaon, we were told by the trainer that one of the Officers of SBI who had come for the training, had a terrible experience. He had confessed and revealed a part of himself during the group discussions in a small group. The remaining part haunted him during his return journey by train. He got down at some odd station and did not return home. He had to be transported back and had to be put on counselling.
While in the train some people become political and get into heated conversations on politics, some become musicians and sing a tune, some become a cricket commentator and start talking on cricket. Some one finds some one in front of him resembling someone he or she loved and goes into a limbo. Some one suddenly becomes poetic and starts writing or singing poetry,.so on and so forth.
See what happened to me way back in 1982. I was travelling to Odisha from Ahmedabad. The journey those days used to take about 44 hours. Sitting relaxed in the train a poet in me started coming out of the hiding. The poem, which I had penned in my dairy that day goes this way.
The Mind in the Body
An oiled thread,
Lighted up.
Flares up or Sharpens to a thread.
A blue flame or a smoky-red
All but to eat away and extinguish.
The train rolls,
Bringing new manifestations
In place of the old.
Attractions attractions
This world is full with it.
I burn more,
Perhaps to be eaten away sooner
Gallant Voices bark around.
Life is short, enjoy it.
Enjoyment, some say, crops up.
Never ending it is.
Turn back, Look in
Samadhi
Does it convey anything?
Come in and get out.
So extinguish or Samadhi,
End is a must.
Copy of my dairy is placed below.
I am only trying to say that in spite of not being a poet, one tends to write poetry in the Train. I may also submit that I have traveled by Railways so many times thereafter. I have done so many other things. But I have not been able to write another poetry.
I am convinced, there will be millions and millions of recorded and unrecorded "Poetry in the Rail" recited on the canvas of time. They must have come from the depth of human souls. What a treasure!!
In my next issue I shall narrate how a tamil boy falls in love with a girl from Gujarat while studying at Bhubaneswar and goes to commit suicide by jumping to a running train. Finally something happens and he pens a poetry in my dairy.
In the meantime, updates in Rail Fail
China has developed world's most powerful electric locomotive. Power of 28,800 Kilowatts, The train is 106 meters long and has a maximum speed of 120 kph. Can draw 10,000 tonnes of cargo on a gradiant of 12%. It is a new record.
There is an engineering marvel. Indian Railways commissions 670 m-long bridge over Bhima river. This is very important part of the 33 km long section which connects Maharashtra to Karnataka.
World's tallest railway bridge over Chenab river in Jammu and Kashmir to be ready by 2021. This is taller than Eiffel tower by 35 meters. Designed for a wind speed of 266 kmph. The arch-shaped bridge will connect Baramulla and Srinagar to Jammu via Udhampur-Katra-Quazigund covering the whole route in 7 hours. Honb'le Railway Minister of Indian Railways met officers of different railway services to discuss ways of fast-tracking of merger of services into one common Indian Railway Managerial Service (IRMS)
The Railway Ministry has instructed its zones to complete up-gradation work of tracks and other associated facilities by March 2022 to enable passenger trains to run at 160 kmph on Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah routes.
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