People walking on the tracks, as seen from inside a Rajdhani Express
Adding to the there-are-two-kinds-of-people-on-Earth cliche that you often hear in the movies, we have another two-kinds-of-people thing - those who walk for leisure and those who walk because they have to.
If you took a train ride anywhere in India, you would see people walking somewhere along the tracks in the middle of nowhere. Not a house in sight. Not a shed or sometimes, a tree. At night, if you are lucky, you would see a poetic sight of someone walking alone out in the dark fields with a torchlight or a lantern in the distance, as you sit in the relative air-conditioned comfort of the Rajdhani Express.
You cannot deny that all of them were not going somewhere.
It is possible the stuff you hear about children walking five kilometres to school and women walking 10 kilometres, plastic pots in hand, to the nearest well could all be true and are not bleeding-heart weekend feature plugs.
Photos taken from Delhi-Kolkata Rajdhani Express, some 50 kilometres around Patna.
For more posts on Indian Railways, see Homes by the tracks, Going where the tracks take, Chugging into history
It is indeed true that people living in urban comfort still fail to appreciate the difficulties face by people living in remote towns and villages. Women especially are put to a lot of difficulty because of the lack of proper toilet facilities. And when we watch all these things from the air-conditioned comfort of trains we just shrug our shoulders and pay it no further attentions.
ReplyDeleteThe reality of big city life. Men and women can live for months from AC room to AC vehicle to AC office without taking a walk down a road.
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