Post 3 - Indian Railways, everyone's home

Tatkal tickets are a myth. I am yet to meet anyone who has successfully logged on IRCTC’s website at 8 AM three days before his journey. In fact, Ripley’s Believe it or Not once featured this guy with facial hair who claimed he had managed a Tatkal booking on his own only to realise later that he was Mamata Baneerji. According to a study, booking a Tatkal ticket on IRCTC’s website is one of the five most unachievable things to do, if you are travelling within India. The other four are escaping gastrointestinal tumour after consuming railways pantry meal, getting an RAC (reservation against cancellation) with a pretty-looking thing, not have a 8-year-old boy in your bogie howling endlessly on a 16-hour long journey and hearing a TC say, “yes, we have spare unreserved seats. How many would you want?”

An off-season train journey in India.

Despite all the hassles we, Indians, still manage to spend half of our lives travelling with Railways. We all have bribed a TC to get half-a-seat on the reserved coach so that we don’t have to travel like exterminated-Jews-under-Hitler on the unreserved one. Before every trip we all pray to god or Sachin Tendulkar, whosoever we believe in, to have a damsel seated facing us so that the two us don’t have a choice but to fall in love and live happily ever after. I don’t know anyone who has ever got laid because of a subsidised Indian Railway ticket. By the way, there’s nothing called as a pretty lass onboard an Indian rail. Or may be, all damsels grow a lot of facial hair, and start resembling porcupine, also known as Indian uncles, for the much coveted journey on railways. I have only seen coaches full of voyeuristic uncles wherever I have travelled on Railways as if IRCTC has a special reservation quota for men with potbelly, hairy navel, unshaven underarms, and disfigured faces.

Much like the Indian society even the Indian railways is subdivided into classes. Lowest in the runk are unreserved guys, also known as the untouchables of travellers incorporated. These unfortunate guys couldn't wake up early enough to book a tatkal reserved ticket and they also couldn't plan their travel well in advance, say Before Christ. As a result, they travel on an unreserved bogie, also known as the train to Pakistan. An unreserved bogie often looks like a wild gathering involving excessive drinking, smoking and promiscuity, much like Roman deities. Some of these gatherings are often termed as the largest mobile orgy ever recorded.

Next is the reserved class in general coaches. There’s no AC, no complimentary food, fresh air, better countryside view, freedom to travel on the steps and cheapest fare among reserved coaches. In fact, these are the safest places to be at as somebody’s fart isn’t recycled and served to you as conditioned air, neither are you under a compulsion to eat rodent excreta in the name of evening supper. People who travel by these coaches are known for their inquisitive nature and by the end of an overnight journey often co-passengers know every minute detail about each other including the anatomy of each other’s bowel movements.

This is how Leander Paes got a confirmed ticket on Rajdhani Express

Top of the class runk are the air-conditioned reserved coaches, which is again sub-divided into RAC, 3-tier, 2-tier, and coaches for really fat people, aka 1-tier. These coaches are habitually filled with city-dwellers who believe it’s impossible to survive on fresh air. The members of the AC club are not known to be chatty and spend long journeys staring at the air-conditioner. In fact, the only time they speak is to express displeasure about food, cleanliness, comfort, pollution, stock market, corruption, traffic jams, rising prices, and preferential treatment given to Rajdhani over the other trains. In fact, they all secretly wish to travel by Rajdhani someday, the most coveted train in the country. Studies show that the only way to get a reserved ticket on Rajdhani is to book way in advance, most preferably when you are inside your mother’s womb.

Fun facts about Indian train travel

a) Everyone sleeps by 8 PM onboard as if it's a meditation retreat.

b) Sleeping is the most popular time kill except if you are a Gujarati. You munch, endlessly.

c) Gujarati is the most spoken language in the train and khakhra, the most spoken word.

d) The luggage secured with chains is the most stolen.

e) RAC are the Schedule Caste of trains. Everyone cringes at the sheer sight of them.

f)  Ticket-checker can be bought anytime. 

g) Everyone is family. We eat, sleep and suffer together.