Jaygovind Sahu

It has been a few months now after the day of the ‘Ayodhya Verdict’. More than anything, people (including me) at work were very happy to find a surprise half-day at office. Again, there was fear. Everyone was trying to reach home and be safe. Everyone was genuinely alert. Outside my office, I saw a very beautiful scene though; something which could have relieved many a people from that fear. I saw a lady with a burqa and a lady with saree getting in to an auto-rickshaw. More than anything about what the verdict had for their own religion(s), they wanted to go home and be with their family. There was definitely something in what I saw which gave me a feeling that everything is going to be okay; that somewhere in our hearts, we (all) still believe that all human beings are of the same genus and species.

Recently when my elder sister returned from a nice holiday trip to Hongkong, Bangkok and the south China, she was short of words to describe how good those places were and how well-organised their tourism is. I could well figure out what she meant from the photographs too. But, when it came to metro transport, somehow I just could not make myself understand how any other netowork be better than the ‘Mumbai Suburban Railway’.

Every working day, I commute to and from my office by local trains. More than once I have felt that these local trains can give someone the worst experience of a train journey. More than once, I have been kicked and punched by the crowd and tried to reciprocate with the best of strengths. I understand that I have not seen what the Bangkok Metro has in it but I still think there is no match to the local trains in Mumbai. I say so because I can somehow feel in what constraints of resources it works on; the density of population it carries and the sincerity it maintains under difficult circumstances.Wikipedia says -

The system carries more than 6.9 million commuters on a daily basis and constitutes more than half of the total daily passenger capacity of the Indian Railways itself. It has one of the highest passenger densities of any urban railway system in the world.

Mahesh (my room-mate in college) arrived mumbai on 15th Feb. When he was around, we had a lot of reasons to utilise the weekend to the fullest. “During the peak hours in the morning, you have lesser chance of facing the fury of the ‘local train crowd’ if you move from south to north.” Sounds like Faraday’s law of something?? Well, this was the rule which had saved the first day. In the weekend though, we chose to be crazy in the Essel World and travelled mainly by bus. We are four people (Mahesh, Deepak, Prashant and me) for the Essel World trip and from the very beginning ‘four’ worked as a magic number for us. We all enjoyed the whole day trying ourselves in the rides. The ‘Hoola-Loop’ roller coaster, in particular, was very exciting.

It is 10 months now in Mumbai and this is my first post in 2011. With only 16.6667% of the year passed, I can still wish you all a prosperous year ahead.