A Train Rant

As I take the train to Nandurbar and then to one of Maharashtra's (and in general India's and further in general, the World's) drought effected villages/ places, to volunteer a week of my life...

In the 'hope' of experiencing for myself (at the least) the predicaments of water scarcity of such a scale and in turn gaining some insight that no amount of article reading can... I see the vast stretches of sugarcane farms. I recall articles that has put it center stage: saying something like 'sugarcane VS drought free life' and then, there was this other article that explains how unwarranted the sugarcane bashing actually is. Anyway not my field of know-how (yet)...

So now I look out of the train window and I'm making mental maps of every little village / town that we pass through ... like imagining what its interior paths, edges, landmarks must be like and how its population is using those spaces... (A residue of something I learnt in a Humane Urban Design elective back in Architecture school)

I look at the changing demography and wonder if its characters care what their town looks like from the train (the most neglected of all 'Urban Edges') and see them walk and move about doing whatever it is that makes a usual day for them. Or perhaps today is a special day for some - a new birth, an interview, a proposal... I can't tell from this window.

All along, I notice the constant foreground to these lives I'm zipping past - the characters all walk on a colourful carpet of unsegregated waste. In patches the carpet thins, almost disappearing but never really. In another area, it folds up to make a pile taller than these characters. They don't seem to notice it, but the cows, crows, dogs and children do. They climb the pile, looking in it, for food.

I take my camera out, to capture something of ALL this...

...when the TT gets in again and asks the new passenger for his identity. The beefy man in grey kurta, beard and skull cap retorts; thinking only his ID is being questioned. The TT calms him down and explains he 'understands' his impulsive agitation but he's asking for the ID just as he checked all of ours an hour ago.

The train slows into another station and my body instantly shifts to shallow breathing mode - a coping mechanism against the stench from railway tracks familiar to any Indian Railway traveller. A man carries a large block of ice, across the tracks of India's largest employer of manual savaging - a profession long 'banned' (I recall from another article). I try getting a picture, but thought of it too late...

Soon after, two kids of about age five and seven come into the compartment. No. I reconsider. Perhaps they're older... after all, these are the kids those articles on malnutrition are talking about. Wearing rags and with unkempt hair... they beg while singing Shirdi wale sai baba aaya hai tere dar pe sawali (a devotional song)...

This is all too much to capture. I put my camera down and take my phone out, to type.

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#‎DroughtDuty

‬‪#‎IndianRailways

‬‪#‎NeverEndingTrainObservations‬