Friday 19 September 2014

Misadventures of Travelling the Route Less Taken



Today, one of my colleagues confided in me that he had been trying to find a weekend travel route from Odisha to Indore, but without any luck. There was only this one weekly train on Wednesday which would be too soon for his expected rendezvous and absolutely no other train available barring that. And the flight rates with merely a week or less to go, for a person who earns barely enough to support him, is out of the question.

I was like, huh! How difficult could it be, finding a train covering one city to another within a single country? That too a country as ours, which is full of millions of commuters traveling from God-knows-where to God-knows-where on a daily basis. I was in for a ghastly surprise! I spent the next 40 minutes looking at all the possible railway routes in which one could reach Indore within the stipulated time my colleague had in hand, to no avail!

Imagine, I even tried routes from Odisha all the way to Kolkata, Chennai, Rajasthan and even Maharashtra to look for probable change of trains. But our Indian Railway system proved to be equally adamant. Not one route, no sir!!!

While it would take nearly 2-3 days traveling to the other side of the country and come back to the state of Madhya Pradesh, (Indore is in Madhya Pradesh, which was the neighboring state of Odisha before Chhattisgarh became an independent state) a train connecting Howrah, Nagpur, or even Kota seemed unavailable.

Yes, one could have got down at Mumbai and then found a train back to Indore, but the time of arrival, if delayed (which is quite possible more often than not), would make him miss his appointment. Moreover, the right time of arrival would also have found him look and feel drawn and haggard following a continuous, not to mention arduous, nearly four-day long journey with absolutely no time to get freshened up for whatever reason he would take such pains to commute the whole distance.

It was so frustrating, just sitting there and researching on the probable routes. I have already given it up as a lost cause. As much as I wish good for him, (which is a rarity, wishing good for people other than yourself, i.e.) I think he is better off where he is. I cannot imagine the pain of the equally or even more tiring journey back home. I sympathize with you, my dear work partner.