didnt want to name it...

People are not born the same, all races don’t start equally

If you start slow, you can always catch up,

And if you have a good lead don’t ever lose it.

Cruising on highways when everything is good,

Don’t look back often but take short stops.

Take time in life’s big changes like you go slow on curves.

Not all routes can be travelled going hard on the gas,

One should know to use brakes, likewise when to say ‘No’.

You are not the only one with problems,

Watch others in traffic jam and learn from their mistakes.

And ‘The End’ it doesn’t even matter,

The journey is not only about the bike, life lies in the ride…

THE LIFE RAILWAY CORPORATION

People say life is a journey. I would prefer to say life is a train journey. Because I nauseate in buses and air travels are so short and I don’t like them. So I say God operates this great railway network and has allocated his children various divisions. So the kids line up and the take their zones.

The girl kid says “papa, I will take the plains and coastal zone, will make people’s life happy and beautiful” and she treats them like her Barbie dolls.
Whereas the mischievous son says “Pop, gimme the mountainous terrain, I will take people through a ride of their life time” and he takes these trains through (wooo, choock, choock ) through corners, rocks and gutters and thus some people have this struggling difficult hard life.

As the population grew God wasn’t able to manage his family run business by only employing his family. So he hires these angles, demons and other non-earthlings (Martians may be) and goes public as the Life Corporation. As year on year this corporation has developed into a mature company (may be) with its input to output ratio steadily increasing but a slower rate than the past years or whatever the appropriate unit of time with which we should measure the life of this organization.
The network has various zones divided like well off, filthy rich, damn poor, just making ends meet and so on. Each zones has numerous stations where people board (are born), switch trains (life takes lot of turns), and get down finally (die). So who decides when to board, whats the route/zone to travel and where to jump off? There is various level of decision making in the network, from the God making strategic decision of altering the network, bringing in new zones, adding more trains like

“hmmm… zones are less, lets divide them more, more my son Miserious take the new zone BPL, you my girl Optiona take this minority zone CEOs”.

And the God’s children maintaining their zones, improving their features and maintaining stations; the angels and demons maintaining their respective stations and operating the trains.

You could imagine two demons chatting

The darky bombshell TsuNaomi says “oh boy, last week was tough, had to jump with my train into sea from the bridge”,
“man, you atleast had fun in the water, last week I was all over with debris and mud”, replied Quaky.

There are also other demons like Hearty the attacky, Cancerious, the big Eights who deal with passengers person to person. So they deal with passenger like below

“Am sorry passenger you have crossed two stations past your destination point, Mr. Hearty the attacky will now throw you off the train now”

The Big Eights says, “Oops, I did a mistake. I made a passenger disembark two stations before his destination”
“don’t worry mate, I will make some other passenger in my list get down two stations after”, said Cancerious.

Each passenger gets many freebies and goodies in a random manner that comes allocated with their ticket which this network calls FATE. So someone might have a Jaguar written in their fate, whereas someone might get a rusty Cadillac tagged with their fate. The ticket also has various statuses like ‘Son’, ‘daughter’, ‘father’, ‘wife’, ‘mistress’, ‘poor husband’, ‘grandpa’, ‘pretty old sick grandpa’ assigned to it and keeps constantly changing.

Customer satisfaction about this network is a widely distributed ranging from “bloody hell good”, “I love my life” to “f**king bad”, “life s**ks”. But this network still maintains a monopoly which no one has ever thought about and people are forced to use this network somehow or the other.

There is a special travel pass of this network called ETERNITY which is only given to the employees of this network and has left many passengers stranded in search of it.

2164

They all show it in Indian films, when a guy goes on a train journey he is sure to travel with a good looking girl. Eventually they get into love or at least become good friends. I have been always fascinated by this kind of imagination, but practically thinking this cannot happen in reality, or someone should have tons of luck for this event to happen. I never had that much amount of luck with me. But whenever I go on a train journey I just hope that I at least make an acquaintance with a good looking girl.

This was the expectation that I carried with me when I boarded Chennai-Dadar express on a fine drizzling Sunday morning. Previous night only I had called my team leader to inform him about my leave and he wished me fine journey thus implying that I din’t have important works in the project. After making my parents get seated and settled in their berths, I moved forward along a few coaches to find my berth, which I got due to a late booking. I found my berth and sat there, observing that the nearby berths were still unoccupied. I kept my fingers crossed hoping that cinema will turn into reality today for me. But the fate was written before itself in the reservation chart which I didn’t notice. A typical old Mr. & Mrs. Iyer occupied the empty berths near mine and my crossed fingers automatically opened up for helping the Iyers with arranging their luggage. Shrugging off my shoulders and exerting out an ‘Hmmm’ I started to find out the page where I had left reading ‘THE DETECTIVE’ by Arthur Hailey.

The engine blew out a long whistle and the wheels started rolling after a jerk crashing all my hopes and indicating that even on this trip I don’t have the required amount of luck. As the train picked up its speed I too started turning the pages of the book faster. Around 150 pages would have been read, when suddenly I felt a touch. A strange boy was standing with gaudy make up wearing a salwar kameez. The boy clapped his hands and kept them on my head saying something in telugu. Then I realized that the boy was a eunuch. I have heard that sometimes these people pester the passengers too much and if they don’t get money they try to harass them. My body shuddered at the thought and I feared that I don’t get into such a situation. So immediately I searched for some change in my purse. Fumbling with the money and conscious of the boy watching me I took out a 10 rupee note n handed it to the boy with fear. The boy again touched my head moved to the next block of berths. The passengers sitting nearby gave me a puzzled look as no one had cared to give money for the boy as if I am fool. I gave them a wry smile unable to explain my fear and felt a fool myself.

Unable to concentrate on the novel again, I started staring through the window hoping for some green pastures. On the due course of looking out, I found a station’s name as ‘Veeravenkatanarianarajupet’. Really a big name for a small town/village!!! As the train passed through many small stations in AP I had some eatables from the noisy advertising vendors and encountered many handicaps, old people and children turned beggars in the form of singing and begging, begging in the name of gods, children dress up like mythical characters, etc. One has to master the art of begging from these people I thought. But at the same time it came to my mind that the government and the people are also quite responsible for their current state. But of the many beggars I saw, one gave me a shock. It was a terrible sight of a blind boy who was crying in pain and shivering constantly carried by a man. I immediately gave the boy money, but then thought what if the man carrying the boy had intentionally poked the boy’s eyes to make a living out of him. Pondering over these ghastly thoughts and reading through the last of pages of the novel, I felt my stomach grumbling and sensed that I am hungry. I got up and headed for my parents’ berth to have lunch with them. On the way through other coaches a group of eunuchs were collecting money. I immediately sensed that they would surely ask me also. So I got into a nearby toilet and from time to time I checked whether the group had passed by me. Bearing the smell I stood for around 5 minutes and passed by the danger.

After lunch I came back to my berth with Kushwanth Singh’s ‘The Company of Women’ and started reading it right away thinking that the book would be a humorous one. After casually going through 30 pages of the book, I sensed that the book is going to be full of sexual encounters. But as there was nothing to do I carried on reading it and I fell asleep. A shaky halt at a station woke me up. As the train rolled on again I continued reading the book. After sometime when pacing through the book interestingly a sudden clap disturbed me. This time I decided not to give even a single rupee. I continued to read the book seriously though my heart was beating hard as the eunuch was pestering constantly. After sometime the eunuch gave up and moved on and I felt a sense of triumph (thought a childish one).

Dusk was nearing and the train was running near Andhra & Karnataka border. Amidst the landscape yellow patches of sun flower fields came to view. Some were fully blossomed smiling in yellow, while others were just newly formed with their heads dropped as if in sin. Also I saw the sun nearing the west horizon, glowing with bright red at the lower half and orange in the upper. The view was beautiful with all the higher wavelengths dazzling my eyes. Crossing the fields, the train passed through a thermal power station. Then the fields disappeared and tall pylons were visible everywhere over the land standing tall and proud in transmitting power. Quickly the sun began to come down gracefully turning into a big pinkish red disc making the size of pylons very small. I felt like the sun was emphasizing its supreme power and watched it slowly sink into the earth splashing the dark blue water into sky.

Lights went on in the coaches and I began to continue to read the book aiming to finish it off before dinner. Reading continuously for two hours I finished the rest of the book only to find that book had taught me two good things. First info - another word for condom is ‘effel’ and second - always use effel if you are in doubt. After finishing the book I ordered dinner from the pantry. Unfortunately I found that the food was of the same quality as before Lalu(ji)’s period. Luckily I didn’t find any plates made of clay or any fodder in the food. After dinner I immediately went to sleep and got up at Dadar in Mumbai hoping to find my distant relative waiting in the station, whom I had never met before….

Note : 2164 - is the train no. for Chennai-Dadar Express.

Thanks to : Frau Radhika for correcting the blunders in the post.