The great indian train journey.....

For four years, (and atleast four times each year) i used to travel by train for two days to go from my hometown Margao in the emerald state of Goa, to Ranchi in the equally enchanting Jharkhand. Everyone used to gasp in horror at the thought of me making such a long journey by train, but it never weighed on my mind. For me, the journey was always an ideal way of collecting my thoughts, having some time on my own to ponder. An equal incentive was also to observe people of different parts of india, and spend my time by trying to work out mannerisms and habits that classified the great indian diaspora into the places of their origin. I must say, by the end of these four years, i have become quite proficient at guessing the origins of fellow travellers.

If your travelling with a family in which the head of the family is a large, rotund and jolly man, and the wife is fat if old and equally svelte if young...laden with enough jewelry to buy the indian railway itself...., then you have the first indicators of a marwari family. But the clincher comes when these people get down at every station....and i mean EVERY station...to meet their relatives and give and take presents from them. At each station they receive food stuff from these noisy relatives and at each station it is the same...mithai, bhujia, khakra...ROTFL.

Maharashtrians are a tricky lot...well for one if the family has been traveling for over a day than it cannot be a maharashtrian family...it is mortally impossible for a maharashtrian family to engage in a journey that will span for more than a day...they will melt i think....they are the most grumpy travelers who cannot adjust one bit with their fellows...always complaining, bickering and ah!...the clincher....throughout the journey the wife will be badgering the husband with complaints and gossips about her in-laws and the poor hen-pecked husband will have a morose look on his face.

If you ever travel with a family that loads on to the train with enough luggage for you to think that they are actually shifting their entire ghar-grihasti to a new abode then you should safely assume that they are a bengali family. And furthermore if they ask you to shift out your one and only bag to make place for their luggage...it is a sure shot bengali family from Calcutta.

Have you ever travelled alongside a bunch of people wearing lungi's, sporting the same moustaches and partaking of some weird, "un-pronouncable", oily food being sold in the train?...this food stuff is called (hope i spell it right)..."pezhambhari"...something of that sort...it is a preparation of fried bananas...and comes with as much oil as the state of kerala can produce in a day!...it drips with oil...these are my friends, keralites. A very amiable lot, they chat and enjoy their journey, but one's desire to befriend them and get cozy diminishes radically when all of a sudden they pull out of their luggage those mushy, squishy bananas -which have long lost their shape and colour as well- and offer you one....omigosh!...NO! NO! you say...and quietly shrink into a corner of your berth!...

There are many more such communities that bring out their qualities with gay abandon on train journeys...all are distinct...no doubt though that they all have one common characteristic in them....they are all INDIAN!