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Showing posts with the label Indian Railways

How I Lost My Two Bucks!

Dadajan Pay, a multinational technology company, has a huge advantage for nonentities like me: it doesn't yet charge the ' platform fee ' which was recently imposed as one more unnecessarily taxing/extracting money from nonentities like me! Yes! All other Pays like Dagger Pay ,  Taser Pay, Knife Pay Fork Pay or whatever are already charging platform fees for all bills, recharges and all! No doubt, Dadajan Pay of the veteran company that boasts of an 'online marketplace for anything' is only trying to compete better with the numerous technology giants that have joined the Pay business, after the introduction and immediate popularity of the UPI system in India . Apart from the no-platform fee Dadajan Pay also offers a variety of Scratch Card Rewards including instant cashback rewards. Therefore, I prefer to make bills/recharges payments on Dadajan Pay. Make hay while the sun shines!  Accordingly on that day I paid for my mobile bill using the Dadajan Pay UPI. I was e...

Mumbai: AC Locals No Longer a Comfort Quotient, But a Necessity!

Called the Lifeline of the Greater Mumbai region, the Mumbai Suburban Railway has so far only around a hundred AC trains —divided between its Western and Central lines with not a single rake available for the Harbor line at the moment. The first AC Mumbai local train was brought into service in 2017 by the Western Railway line while the Central Railway line had to wait till 2020 for its first AC rakes. Then the Pandemic delayed all proposals for more and more AC rakes and only this year there was some news of more than 200 rakes to be inducted. There’d been    suggestions that all the local train services be made airconditioned while a few leaders opposed this by saying only the regular services needed to be increased substantially. The price difference is obviously a factor here, for the fares for the AC trains are nearly six or seven times more than the regular fares as opposed to the contention of the Railways that the AC fares are more or less equal to that of the non...

About a Train Journey, Again!

I seem to enjoy a special relationship with the trains of the Indian Railways, for most of my train journeys always yield a memorable result—at times very amusing and at times dearly painful. Over the decades I must’ve spent quite a few sleepless nights on various railway station platforms thanks to the delayed schedules or freak/serious mishaps on various tracks or my missing a train or the connecting trains, not to mention other sleepless nights I spent on board looking to get a reservation on the way that never came my way! I meet various interesting people on most of the journeys that make my journeys delightful or rather irritating depending on their quality, and most importantly most of those precious guys end up becoming my characters in my short or mini stories (most of which you can find in my various published collections of short stories. A few remain here too!)! Now, I invite you on board a train for a brief journey I undertook recently which actually doesn’t qualify fo...