VEINED MUMBAI....

What does one write for his/her first ever blog and post?! So after a lot of thought on what should be my first post I zeroed it down to my everyday life experience....

So to start from the beginning of all the beginnings.. i have lived all my life (well most of d part) in a colony big enough to accommodate few thousands. The place is like what central park is to New York...blissfully cradled in womb of nature away from the hustle bustle but still very much part of the city .. Its like a modern day self-sufficient village.. well not being a frequent goer in the city i have always marvelled of how people travel in the Mumbai’s famous trains... yes.. this post  is about  the very lifeline of the city TRAINS and me a tiny speck in all those crowded heads while i surge or rather flow on with the human tide...

I travel to college by trains... yes me .. which i would have thought quite impossible had someone asked me a few years back.. but if u have stayed in Mumbai and haven’t been on trains its like you are a Christian and haven’t  been baptised.. allow me first to sketch you a visual of how local trains look in Mumbai during the peak hours. They are slender metal boxes with discoloured peeling paint and paan stains all over the sides like the paint was meant to be that way!! .... looking at the very structure makes you wonder at the strength of the metal used... and when they are filled or rather stuffed with human bodies they look like overstuffed sandwiches with the fillings bulging from the sides at a point of time that they might drip and fall...so this is roughly how the trains look when they arrive at the station to fill in more people in  their  already stuffed compartments... now my narration would like to take you to the inside of these modern day voluntary torture chambers.. when ones eyes rest on such a scene as that, one often wonders of what’s the highest compressibility a human body can endure?! Puts a huge question mark on the limit of endurance! So here we are in a crammed up compartment with people of various strata's of the society scuffling, standing ,sitting, hopping ,meditating on one leg (ah yes, space crunch does that) . It’s amazing, really, the sense of understanding people develop when one is subjected to something that extreme .. even after a time you start enjoying it.. i know that sounds weird but believe me, when the trains are empty you feel like some vital part of the train is missing! Its hard to express the magnitude of unknown brotherhood that one experiences if you are a daily train passenger..u start smiling and recognise faces over the months of travels by the same local.You even make friends with people you would generally not do so...the throwing about and elbowing of bodies which usually takes place whenever a station arrives, the uncomfortable proximity, somehow  gets you connected, a mutual understanding with utter strangers is glimpsed on such situations which was plain freaking the 1^st time i boarded the trains!i apologised for every foot i stamped, every elbowing and pushing about i did! But as time passed realisation dawned that no one really minds being rowdy on trains was the key to getting down on time for your stop....  i am sure this is the same with all the the overly crowded metro cities of india given the facility of trains and metros!

Travelling in these trains gives oneself ample opportunity of observing .. learning, understanding the   amazingly different kind of people that have been blessed to grace these congested pieces of match boxes... life without trains for a mumbaikar is nightmarish... it like Paris without metro!

I often visualise  trains in the city as blood vessels.. they are the carriers of oxygen in this case humans to different areas.... sleek ,flexible, highly networked and efficient(to some extent) they are lifelines of the city without which travelling would be unimaginable...

On the concluding note i would praise the engineers behind those construction of fabulous hell carriages (makes even charon’s* fleet of carrier of dead look shamefully petite!)which till date haven’t given up my exploding through the sheer strain it goes through... the last thing i would ever want to be is a Mumbai local! But one of the many things without which this city of dreams would be incomplete...

                                                

*charon- greek mytho character,the ferryman of the dead