ChinmayC Blog

Can't really blame anyone! It's a universal tendency of the Sapiens to covet for the fast buck and try to make it by all means anytime anywhere. However, in the digi-modern era this tendency has become fully class barriers neutral--meaning all from the micro/petty operators to the biggest of all tycoons and also including even government agencies and PSUs tend to make hay with the fast buck. Although individual profit or commission has been the real motive, greed of the lowest order has mostly penetrated the urge, making it overpowering for the makers and scarily irritating for the gullible customers.  Even if you are a regularly-paying good customer the agents from the paanwallahs to the giant service providers keep on pestering you to consider various 'offers' that help them make the fast buck and irritate you to no small extent. Asking for 'feedback' is another way to egg you on. You may think you've paid full for the service and have no time to enter...

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...

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...