Thoughts from a train journey

My Odyssey, if you will.

During my recent two-week trip to India, I took a Vande Bharat train from Coimbatore to Bangalore.

Some random thoughts from the trip.

Accepting one’s station

My parents remain in awe of me. Not for anything I have achieved, but for the sheer fact that I have managed to survive in the world successfully despite what they believe is a fatal lack of attention to detail and a horrifying level of forgetfulness.

Over the years, I have tried to make it clear to them that this is not who I am. I am a thriving individual whom people trust to think my way through and solve problems. However, the various big and little practical slip-ups when I’ve been around them have always defeated my arguments.

Long back, I’d booked a flight for my parents' first international trip, told them the wrong date, and took them to the airport after the flight had departed. This wasn’t the first straw nor the last, but it certainly was a key foundation on which my shaky reputation was built. Over the years, other little examples have only added more sketchy awnings to this building.

They strongly believe that despite whatever I may have done in my career, or the fact that I’ve lived by myself since I was 21, I have only managed to survive by sheer divine will and luck. It’s not an argument devoid of reason, but it’s not the full story either.

However, I keep reinforcing the point to them. When I boarded my taxi to the station from my home in Coimbatore two weeks back and told the driver to take a specific route through Annapoorna so I could get breakfast, the driver was perplexed.

“But sir, you’ve booked a ride to the airport!”

My middle name is ‘awkward mix-ups’, so I recovered quickly and politely asked him if I could change the destination. We rolled off without much ado except for the fact that my parents, who’d stepped out to wave me goodbye, watched and heard all this. Their faces bore both amused concern and resigned understanding.

Coimbatore’s heritage building

On a recent trip to Europe, I told N that everything and everyone there is obsessed with the past. The TVs talk about old art and history, and words like vintage and tradition are thrown around as casually as certain two-word expletives in Delhi. The upside is that important heritage buildings are preserved.

Coimbatore also preserves a heritage building: its railway station.

Walking onto the platform, I was gripped by the happy nostalgia of so many childhood trips that started there and the sad knowledge that in the last three decades, not much has changed there. There’s barely space to walk with luggage, parts of the platform are crumbling, and the same three shops sell tea, coffee, rusk, newspapers and water.

Ok, it’s not exactly the same. Some platforms now have escalators, and that’s that.

It’s a point of great annoyance partly because I believe Coimbatore has always been a stepchild city. It’s the second largest economy in Tamil Nadu but barely registers in its cultural consciousness. It’s only remembered when someone has to go to Ooty or, now, increasingly and nauseatingly, when someone comes to visit the cult called Isha.

As someone from the city, it’s always been a chip on my shoulder. Every time someone from outside the state asks me if I am from Madras (ok, Chennai) just because I am Tamil, my heart dies a little inside.

The city has been a second thought for decades among successive governments, and a large share of its development is attributable to its spunky entrepreneurial class, which has pulled itself up by the bootstraps and occasionally contributed to the city's growth. It’s also a second thought for railways. Despite the volume, trains rarely start from this city; instead, they often pass through to Kerala on one side and to Chennai and other cities in other states on the other. The train station remains crumbling, old, and too small.

Taking my first Vande Bharat

Coimbatore to Bangalore is ~350 kilometers, which puts it in the awkward spot for both flights and trains. While the flight would be 45 minutes, I would need to account for an additional 5 hours total (especially in Bangalore, with its 90-minute ride from the airport). Trains take about 6-7 hours and avoid all the annoying aspects, like check-in, the need to remove my belt and be patted down by strange men. Besides, I am a sucker for train journeys.

Vande Bharat was launched as India’s flagship train in 2019, and in the last six years I’d not taken one. It was quite nice. The seats were comfortable, and the ride was relatively smoother than other trains.

From the outside, it looked sleek, although the exaggerated conical, aerodynamic nose gave the impression that the train reached enormous speeds. The peak speed it reached was 110 kmph. And since the 350 km journey took about 6.5 hours, its average speed was close to 50 kmph. It’s not terrible, but I’ve been in way too many hair-raising rides at much faster speeds in rusting steel clunkers masquerading as buses across TN and Kerala. They all had the aerodynamics of a block of paneer, barely functioning brakes, and the spirit of a force 8 gale.

As with many modern things, aesthetics makes up for functional mediocrity.

Shitty train coffee nostalgia

There must be a Japanese word for being disappointed because you had romanticized something already shitty (train coffee) but ended up getting something even worse.

I like the bad Indian train coffee. I like the guy droning on ‘kaaapi kaapi’ as he walks the aisles. I like the big stainless steel jar he carries and the way he opens a tap to pour a searing-hot liquid into a tiny paper cup. I like its unique smell. I might hate the taste of it anywhere but on the train, swaying enough to possibly spill the lava onto my hands; the watery, sugary mess is redeemed by the ritual. The sheer joy of being on a moving train endows the experience with powers beyond its true nature.

This same nostalgia prompted me to ask for coffee on Vande Bharat, even though I had opted out of the meals. However, turns out the shitty coffee has now been downgraded to something even shittier.

I got a sachet of instant coffee, cream, and sugar mix that I mixed with hot water. The resulting liquid swirled with white sediment like gutter runoff and challenged me balefully on my decision. I still bravely took a sip for old times' sake. It was so terrible that I stopped immediately, not just because I don’t like ingesting toxic waste, but also because I was afraid it would ruin the nostalgia of the tepid train coffee forever.

Perhaps I can still get the old tin-can version in other trains.

Climate change is real - ice age is back

While the developing continent of Europe melts in the heat and people swelter without AC, Indian Railways had managed to recreate an ice age inside Vande Bharat carriages. Thankfully, I had an extra jacket I normally use on flights with me, but even with that, I felt the chill going into my bones. The hot-blooded South Indians in the carriage sat shivering, and soon we all discovered that the vestibule wasn’t air-conditioned. Soon enough, a mini-civilization of intrepid adventurers formed there, standing near the toilet, thawing like frozen peas.

A fully locked-in IT warrior

A fully locked-in IT warrior sat next to me with his classic weapon of trade — a black ThinkPad laptop that has seen some stuff. Soon after he boarded the train at Erode, he set up his workstation, put on his headphones, and logged into a Teams call. Unmuting himself, he announced that he was traveling and that he would just be listening, checked a few tickets in some internal tool, contemplated his choc-a-block Outlook calendar, and finally sat back scrolling Instagram on his phone while the call droned on in his ears. A man at peace in his home environment.

Find me on Insta @tyagarajan

Toilet tries

When it was designed, the toilet in this Vande Bharat coach was meant to have a button you could press to open the curved door. However, the mechanism had long since fallen victim to the entropy of Indian trains. Since that no longer worked and there was no way to lock the door, they’d added a good old-fashioned steel latch, as had been our tradition on train toilets for decades. A nice touch of nostalgia.

As Indian train toilets go, this was a step up. It had a suction flush, and you didn’t see the tracks rush past where you poop. It no longer looks like the love child between a haunted house and a prison camp. Could be better, though.

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Since it is a train going to the Silicon Valley of India, it follows the same speed of approach as software development. The last 20% of the journey took about the same time as the first 80%. The moment the train crossed Hosur, it approached the last ~40 kms to Bangalore as tentatively as a senior dev forced to push code into production on a Friday evening.

And then it dropped me off at the most pessimistic train station any city ever had….

Could be worse,

Tyag