Thoughts in a real train :)

Despite the sempiternal traffic jams, I was at the railway station much before the scheduled departure. Even though there was excessive demand for tickets, there were not many people in the train and there were none in my coupe…I had to use a lot of influence to get this ticket. One of my uncles had secured it as part of some emergency quota… Everything can be put as emergency…He not only confirmed my ticket but also made sure I get free dinner, pillows and bedsheets!!! I was treated like a king… That’s the advantage of knowing someone in railways!!!

As I sat alone in my coupe, one thing that I could recollect was the introductory chapter in Chetan Bhagat’s latest fiction, One Night @ call centre…I was wondering whether something like that might happen tonight…:) And maybe I could write a story on it someday…But alas nothing of that sort happened…
It was an extra coach and the list of names was not yet published and there was no way I could have known my companions. Traveling alone in a train for 12 hours was not something I was looking forward to considering the fact that I had brought nothing to read…

My curiosity was killing me until a group of army men came along with their arms and ammunition!! I am not kidding, they actually had rifles and machine guns with them…I was wondering what they were upto…After some initial introductions I managed to start a conversation with them…Since they spoke only hindi I was finding it extremely difficult to talk but I felt they were finding it even more difficult to comprehend..:)
They were apparently going for some training camp and as a result they had to carry all the accessories with them…While I was thoroughly excited holding the machine guns and examining them, they were even more excited about holding my laptop…They were very keen to know what I did with a laptop & to my surprise I found it very difficult to explain why I needed one..:) Anyway after some initial exploration they wanted to know what a software engineer actually does? They were interested about my company, work, salary etc… It was fun explaining them why we get paid so much for the kind of work that we do…

Since we were already 8 of us in the coupe I wasn’t expecting any more people. But to my horror 5 more guys boarded in the last minute. All of them were college students going to Delhi for vacation. Most of them I believe had completed their 7^th sem exams and had been placed through campus. After these people arrived I settled in my upper berth because I no longer could converse with them at their pace. Just imagine about 12 people talking continuously in hindi and you sitting on top trying to make some sense of the conversation below…That’s exactly what I was going through!!!

The first group was busy cribbing about the generals treating them like “kutthes” (dogs) for peanuts, while the second group cribbing about the HODs, lecturers and how they were bent upon sucking their blood…Since I could relate to the latter I focused my attention to their puerile episodes. Each one of them had their own set of stories to narrate and all of them were just hilarious. From how they got bashed by the HOD to how they managed to finish the exams…
There were these usual stories of copying, getting caught, hostel masala which I think has to be censored from here..:) Some of them were so farfetched it was really difficult to believe something like that could have happened...There was this guy who actually boasted about bribing his lecturer for passing him in practicals…He was apparently thrown out of the room…All these reminded me as to how much “seeda sada” I was…If you ask me to talk about my college life, I wouldn’t have much to narrate except for how regularly I used to attend college…:) (6^th sem being an exception!!!)

The noisy banter continued through the night, but I had dozed off without me realizing it…The next morning I was surprised to see 2 people sleeping in each berth with even the passage way not being spared!!! The remarkably capacious coupe had become totally cramped. I bet these things happen only in the Indian Railways!!!