A Thousand Words

An attempt to make 'em better than a picture.

I'm on a train, sitting idly on the (side) lower berth with my back pressed against the divider between two sections. It is around 1 am in the night and I'm peering through the glass. People who stop looking out of the window at night because there's nothing to see are wrong. I see a new side to the surroundings: a different, quieter side which I like. Rocking softly back and forth I see streams of light passing by as the train hurtles into the blackness. Abandoned railway platforms, roads bathed in soft yellow from streetlights. I see a town I think, or is it a city? I see some buildings which have passed me by. It is almost definitely a town I think. A town on the outskirts of a city most likely. I check the time and remind myself that I am expecting to reach Pune around this point.

It looks like a factory, with a fortress around it. A small patch of houses, weak ones with tarpaulin on the roof to protect against the rains but won't probably stand any chance in the wind. I see shanties, clobbered small roads as the train approaches a bridge overlooking a river — the cliché of railway movie escapades. I seem to be slowly coming up on the city; the train seems to slow down a bit. Wow, people really love bright halogen lamps around here. A red signal blinks red and tries to stop an oil tanker which does not stop. The tankers and trucks are the Kings of the Night. As the world sleeps, they will awake to life and, ahem, freedom. As day comes, they will hide somewhere and get the entire night's worth of sleep. They will start scurrying when darkness falls again. I know, I empathize.

I enter a dark area (has the city passed?) and I see light streaming out of the train from the window ahead of me. Probably another nyctophile there. Or maybe they just forgot to switch off the light, which seems more likely. We are few in number in this particular train.

The dark was a red herring however, and I'm suddenly bang in the middle of a station on which this train is mostly going to halt, judging by its speed. The words A.C chair car, blaze out at me from the Deccan Queen which I can observe parked in the track next to mine. And now the train has stopped. I see no platform come up, and so, conclude that this seems to be a halt before the actual halt. My recent experiences with the Indian Railways, have been pretty lovely. The trains usually love the fact that I have boarded them and don't like to see me get off soon. As I result, I've reached my destination late by anywhere between 3 to 6 hours in the past few months. This train promises to be no exception: as soon as I boarded it, I was greeted by the ticket invigilator's grim warning. Apparently we were going to take a diversion along the way and take a longer route, which will take anywhere between 1-2 hours more to reach. You see, trains love me.

We've started moving and I see the familiar interweb of railway tracks before we reach a major station. Tea vendors are scurrying around the platform, waiting in place before they come aboard. I close my curtain to save myself from poking and prying eyes that may or may not board the train, hoping they leave me in peace. It's been quite a while since I've come up with something to write.

An electronic female voice announces the arrival of my train on Pune station sorely for the benefit of tea vendors to commence their sales pitch towards snoring passengers. Long gone are the days of railway platforms which stay quiet in the night. I hear modest bustling around in my coach as someone who's made their way in tries to lock their luggage with a chain to the bottom of their seat. They are fumbling around with it, probably crippled by the absence of light. I peek around my curtain in curiosity: they are hidden behind their own curtain, but I see the light getting switched on.

The cool voice announces my "superfast" train's arrival, followed by a short note of how it's running late by 2 hours. If only all voices were as polite, apologetic and kind as this electronic one, we probably won't have any problems and would live in utopia. Again, that may be a problem in itself, so I'm confused. I see a man sitting just outside my window fiddling around with his cell phone while plugged into a wall outlet. He is probably reading something important.

The train has started moving and I am mildly thankful that no one seems to have arrived to claim the side upper berth above me. I might have a free rein over my side of the train to stretch out tomorrow morning^[1]: when I'm gonna be late and will most likely reach post lunch time at the office, this is going to be my silver lining.

There are paintings on the walls of this platform. A collection of handprints occupying a wall in the background of a blaring "Saare jaahaan se accha" catches my eye. I try to think of one thing in which we are better than the world. Mangalyaan comes to mind^[2], mostly because I saw a documentary on it yesterday. I wonder if the song writer knew this when he wrote that song, or if it was purely wishful thinking at that point.

I am kind of regretting giving away my nice upper berth for a side lower one as no air reaching me is conditioned enough in this A/C compartment^[3]. I feel perspiration is going to be a bit of a problem. Aah well, at least I get my window and the scene keeps changing before me: better than what they show on cable TV anyway.

The train has left the station and gathered speed now. All those city houses and buildings are gone behind me and I see outskirts again. Small clusters of houses with small porches and even smaller lamps. They seem to be getting more and more sparse now. The train is superfast. Very soon the only thing I can see outside are pinpricks of white light and the reflection of my own laptop screen on the window. I try to peer into the darkness and see an isolated light in the distance. I wonder what it is. Some old shack in which someone might be sleeping at this hour. They don't know that I'm writing about them. They will simply get up in the morning and go around business as usual.

I open the curtain to try to get some cool air. I should probably be sleeping but I feel awake as I always do when my circadian rhythm has adapted itself differently. I see something called "Tej Platinum" making its presence felt in big blue neon signs out in the night. I wonder if the presence being made felt is so necessary this late at night: especially with a name which gives away precious little about the business (I highly doubt that there is a shop selling platinum in the middle of nowhere). The mind of someone who codes for a living falls prey to the occupational hazard of making ridiculous pet peeves out of inefficient expression of information. This may seem ironical coming from someone who prefers a thousand words to a picture.

A picture you see, has to be observed correctly for it to equal a thousand words in any way. With so many pictures taken by smart phone cameras around the world today being selfies^[4], I wonder if this is true. Maybe if you sit in front of it and try to come up with things you don't see or which you wished you saw, or have convinced yourself that you are seeing, maybe then, you can come up with a thousand words which are no equal to your visual representation. But then, with the flood of pictures in the Cloud today, of varied versions of duckfaces and self indulgences, I repeatedly keep questioning this old saying.

I was sitting in a restaurant in Hyderabad waiting for my food when an old man and (presumably) his daughter came in and sat at the table beside me. They looked at the menu, and said not a word to one another. The waiter came by and each of them gave their separate order. The girl received an important message on her phone which she started reading with great focus. Her father looked at the menu card, probably thinking over what to get next. He saw the glass of water and drank a sip. Shortly afterwards, the waiter brought over their food and they ate in silence. The girl probably talked once to her father to clarify on something he was thinking of ordering. They finished eating and left. Beside them were a family of four, with two children fiddling around on (a) a smart phone taking pictures and (b) an iPad, while the irate father yelled at the waiter for messing up their order and the mother was casting furtive distrustful glances at the creepy bearded dude two tables away who was eating alone and watching her children do important stuff on nice 16 million color screens.

I check my word count in the sweet vim-airline status bar and see that I have crossed a thousand five hundred. I mentally high five myself and look out the window again.