With just a bottle of Rum and the desire to get home- Adventures on the Great Indian Railways

Imagine you are in a remote place like Guwahati and need to get home to Delhi 2000 km away and you have a shitload of luggage, a few hundred rupees in your pocket and a bottle of first class rum in your belongings. I am not sure what I would’ve done but I’ll tell you what someone I know did!!  In those days, the AC TTE (Travelling Ticket Examiner-for all my well heeled friends who havent been in a train in a long time!!) generally had a berth in the 2nd AC compartment. So my friend hauls the luggage into the AC compartment, finds the TTE, takes an empty bottle of Bisleri, pours out half the bottle of Rum and thrusts it at the TTE and says “I want your seat. The TTE looks at him like as if Amrit has been offered to him. He gratefully accepts the bottle and obediently vacates his berth. And my friend had a comfortable journey all the way to Delhi for 2 days and nights!! That’s not all, when the train reaches Delhi, he now waits for all the people to get off, calls a few coolies, takes out plastic cups used for tea, pours out half a glass of rum into it and offers it to the coolies and gets them to carry his enormous amount of luggage to  the taxi. NO, he did not pay the taxi driver in Rum!! Now let me tell you another tale. There’s this poor sod who gets leave to travel all the way from Guwahati to Bangalore but alas there’s no reservations in the AC coach and only RWL (in between Waitlisted and Reserved-so you share a berth) in 2nd class. But he’s well prepared you see, he’s got two bottles of rum!! So what do you expect, he should probably get upgraded to 1st class right?? Wrong. He is so shit scared of offering it to the TTE, what if he turned on him indignantly and loudly in front of everybody “You think you can buy me for a bottle of RUM?? You should be ashamed to call yourself an officer”. So the poor sod travels 3 days and 2 nights sharing a 2nd class berth with a stranger. and who was that dunce-me!

I am sure many of you have never heard of Tinsukhia, Assam, I on the other hand had the good fortune of being in the East and explored a reasonable amount. One of the unique trains of the Eastern Railway was the Tinsukhia Mail (running daily between New Delhi to Tinsukhia (Eastern tip of Assam) and taking three full days ) it used to get cancelled regularly once a week because accumulating the delays over 6 days, the 6th day train would be a full day late!! So it was a train best to avoid if you were on the last day of your leave!! Of course most people would also not have heard of the Naliya Queen either, the only train which ran to Naliya, on the western tip of Kutch, Gujarat the route of which had innumerable unmanned railway crossings between Bhuj and Naliya.  At each of these crossings the train driver would stop a few metres short, diligently walk, close the railway crossing, walk back, move the train ahead about 50 mts, stop, go open the railway crossing and then proceed ahead. If I remember right there were about a dozen such crossings I guess! And I don’t think the time schedule for the train had factored this in but that wasn’t a problem for the locals I guess, trains were a novelty anyways.

Now imagine the same dude-me-travelling ticketless. And let me tell you how. One of my buddies Ashish was getting married in Patna and I was posted at Ambala those days. So I ask my Flt Cdr for leave the day before, finish my flying and catch the Shatabdi to Delhi. Of course the internet was still in the labs of the US and Japan and you had to stand in mile long queues to get a ticket so I skipped that option and for some strange reason I believed that Patna was just a few hours away from Delhi and there would be plenty of trains and tickets wouldn’t be a problem. Very officer like, I reach delhi after a shatabdi journey in the evening and find that Patna is an overnight journey and there’s only the Magadh Express which will get me there on time and…….. no reservations!!! So I heft my bag onto my shoulders, get myself an unreserved ticket, a coke and burger and scour the train for a place to sit. Lo and behold, I spy an empty berth on the top in the III tier AC with apparently no takers. So I park myself comfortably, finish the burger and coke waiting for the TTE, to pay the difference in fare and before I realize it, am fast asleep. There’s a bit of a jerk on the train which wakes me up and I wake up stiff and sore and blink my eyes to see its bright morning!!!! I had slept through the night.. After stretching a bit I climb down and find the TTE, who incidentally looks exactly like Lalloo Prasad Yadav sitting next to me. He looks at me and adjusting the paan in his mouth says “हांह भाई साब आप कहाँ से आ रहे हो ??. I was tempted to say आसमान से but wisely refrained from doing so and said Delhi instead. He then asked me for my ticket and I rather sheepishly pulled out my “Unreserved ticket”. He practically had a heart attack and said “यह क्या है”. Then I told him that I was waiting for the TTE and slept off and nobody woke me up. As all TTEs do, he pulled out at least half a dozen books and made enough calculations to build a nuclear device and triumphantly came to the figure of 2000 and odd Rupees as fine. Of course I was no longer the guileless innocent kid and flat out refused saying that I didn’t have that much money. I then looked him in the eye and said “कितना चाहिए” he didn’t bat an eyelid either and said “दीजिये आप ही सोच समझकर दीजिये”. I quickly realized that it was already morning and Patna was just an hour away probably, so I pulled out a 50 Rupee note and offered it to him. He went apoplectic and asked me to get out of the train. So, I got off at the next stop and got into the unreserved compartment and shared space with a dreamy looking (probably a zonked out) sadhu with a Rastafarian hair style smoking a beedi talking about life and the world till we reached Patna an hour later.

     

Talking about shatabdi, it reminded me of my friend Dipesh who was posted with me at Ambala and belonged to Delhi. One of the times when he was going home, on the shatabdi from Chandigarh, he boarded the train and to his dismay found his compartment absolutely empty. And the next one was apparently filled with lissom Punjabi lasses with lots of free seats. Now he was a sharp and quick fellow and promptly went up to the TTE and asked for a change of compartment. Obviously the TTE asked him why?? And pat came his reply “इसमें सीट उलटी side face कर रहीं हैं. ऐसे मुझे चक्कर आता है. And can you beat it, he got a change of compartment!!!!

Dipesh and I were very good friends and we shared a lot of wild and whacky times together. One instance I remember is when there was a farewell party for one of the officers in the mess, it was a cocktails, which is neither a proper dinner nor a binge- highly unfulfilling. So, when he came to my room after the cocktails, feeling bored, I suggested "wanna go to Vaishno Devi?" Though he was not particularly religious, he immediately agreed, maybe for the experience. So we quickly changed, packed an overnighter and reached the railway station. Now Ambala is an important transit station and all trains going to Jammu pass through, so I wasn’t worried about not having a reservation. We bought tickets, I think! and stood waiting on the platform. The first was too crowded so we gave it a miss and so was the second one. It was now well past midnight and we decided that whatever the state, the next train it was. And boy was it crowded… I quickly got some newspaper and we shoved and jostled our way into a 2nd class compartment and requested a hostile crowd to 'kindly adjust' to park one bum onto a seat each. Well we couldn’t sit all night like that and well… what the heck, nobody onboard knew we were officers anyways, so we spread the newspaper on the floor of the compartment in two adjacent coupes (you could call it I guess) and went to sleep. I was suddenly woken up by a shrill scream and woke with a start to find a stout woman who was sleeping in the lower berth beside me berating me for being “बेशरम” and what not and forced me to vacate the floor space. I got up did the “kindly adjust” act with the gent sleeping opposite and parked myself there till she slept off again. Immediately I regained my space on the floor and was fast asleep in no time. The next shrill siren a few hours later I was half expecting, so I just got up, went to the next coupe and slept off without being disturbed for the rest of the night!!. It was a fabulous darshan we had, we went jogging all the way up, waited in the queue and Dipesh fell asleep on my shoulder standing!!!(he even fell asleep while riding a bike-but that’s another story). We had absolutely delicious Rajma chawal at the top and then sprinted all the way down the steps in pouring rain coz we had to be back for flying on Monday and we hadn’t told the Flt Cdr about our little trip. As it turned out both of us landed up with high fever and were down in our rooms for a couple of days. But then, those were the days when we were footloose and fancy free…

The art of never giving up

         There’s a very good friend of mine who never tires of making fun of me and the level to which I will go to achieve something. And he’s generally referring to an episode more than a decade and a half back when I was a very fresh and young officer posted at Tezpur in Assam.

We were having our term break and we hadn’t expected to get any leave, but at the last moment the Chief Flying Instructor decided we could do with a break of about a fortnight. And so we all rushed off to Guawhati, the nearest rail head to catch a train back home which was Bangalore for me. The journey of 3000+ km from Guwahati to Bangalore was covered in 4 days and 3 nights and there was just one train a week. The other options were come via Madras (yes it was still Madras and Calcutta and Poona) or via Delhi and with no reservation I was going to have to travel unreserved all the way. I’ll try and explain to you how desperate a situation it put me in.

Even I wouldn’t believe it but those were the days of Indian Railways when the Tinsukhia Mail (running daily between New Delhi to Tinsukhia (Eastern tip of Assam) and taking three full days ) used to get cancelled regularly once a week because accumulating the delays over 6 days, the 6^th day train would be a full day late!! Of course most people would also not have heard of the Naliya Queen, the only train which ran to Naliya, on the western tip of Kutch, Gujarat the route of which had innumerable unmanned railway crossings between Bhuj and Naliya.  At each of these crossings the train driver would stop a few metres short, diligently walk, close the railway crossing, walk back, move the train ahead about 50 mts, stop, go open the railway crossing and then proceed ahead. If I remember right there were about a dozen such crossings I guess! And I don’t think the time schedule for the train had factored this in. and with no notice I had to travel unreserved for 4 days and 3 nights. So the great Indian Railways was my last option.

It was when I was faced with this situation that I remembered that the Naval Chief had come on a visit to Tezpur on the day before and he was to fly out of Guwahati the next day. Armed with this information and with all the guilelessness and innocence of a few months experience in the IAF, I convinced Awa my friend and course mate that we must try to get a lift on the Naval Chief’s aircraft whether to Delhi, Bombay or anywhere but out of Assam. So we worked our way to the Guwahati airfield. After an arduous effort, I found out that the Chief was scheduled to fly to Calcutta and then onto Vizag and then Bangalore!!! Yippee!! Perfect. So in 2 days I could be home, if only I could deal with the minor inconvenience of how to get onboard? Well, I put all my energies into it and came to know that the power of a Yes or a Sorry lay with the Chief’s Staff Officer. Awa was a little apprehensive, with us dealing with the Chief and all, especially with him from an Army background, but I managed to convince him. Well, the staff officer proved to be as elusive as the Chief himself and I just couldn’t get through to him. In the process, I let go of the direct train as well and frankly, was now desperate. I bugged the COO (Chief Operations Officer) of the base so much in trying to get to the chief / SO that finally he said “if you don’t get out of this base right now, I’ll personally put you in jail”. That to me sounded like the death knell on my hopes to fly down to Bangalore and a long and tiring train journey.

            I am not sure where this ‘never give up-whatever the odds’ attitude stems from, but I have a sneaking feeling that it was due to the way I was brought up. I remember, I was in my 2^nd std and I had been a fairly studious child vying for the top spot. It was one of the term exams and I had just got the report card. To my horror I found that I stood 12^th in class. With a trembling heart I reached home and gave it to my mother. I don’t really recall my mother’s reaction but it was my father I was terrified of. Later in the evening when he came home and my report card was submitted to him, I don’t remember him having thrashed me, he was probably too shocked, but I remember being thrown out of the house.  Well kind of, I was not allowed inside and had to sit on a chair outside the living room in the darkness. My mother opened the door to give me some food and it was later on in the night probably 9:30-10 p.m., when my father summoned me inside. I was terrified but lo and behold, when going through the report in detail as to where I had screwed up, it was found that the teacher had made a mistake in totalling. So the next day my father came along to the school and the matter was promptly rectified and I think I stood 2^nd. I really don’t know if it had any visible impact on me, but ever since I have always tried to do my best at all times.

I have been fascinated by aeroplanes for a long long time, I guess I never grew out of my childhood phase!!! I was in my 5^th Std in The Frank Anthony Junior School on Wellington Street near Richmond Circle. After school everyday, my brother Sanju and I would walk up to the Richmond Circle bus stop and board the BTS bus home. Enroute, in the same building as Casa Piccola was a book store I used to pass by everyday. Once I happened to go in and I saw the most beautiful book I had ever seen in my life. It was called “US Air power”. It was big and fat and heavy with millions and millions of glossy beautiful photographs of aeroplanes and rockets and stuff and cost a princely sum of 240 rupees. This was 1984 and that was a BIG sum for those days. Every day while passing by the shop, I would steal a few moments to see a few pages of the book and hurry home. The kind uncle at the shop never objected. I have never hesitated to ask for something I’ve wanted and didn’t this time either. To their credit, my parents didn’t refuse and only laid down a condition that I come 1^st in the final exams. Thereafter I was a driven and a possessed boy. All I could dream of was that book. I think I really worked hard, more than I ever did and finally at the end of the year my parents got it for me. Today, when I see it, it just seems to be a just a lot of pictures of aeroplanes but then, it meant the world and probably put me on the path to me becoming a fighter pilot in the IAF.

When I was in NDA, I was from a civilian background, struggling to cope up with the gruelling physical standards required at that place. I was from a civilian background not having played anything other than gully cricket before. So the swimming, the PT, drill and Cross country I found really tough. In X country though, I found myself to be a better than average runner, coming in the 3^rd enclosure in my 2^nd term. In my 3^rd term, during the Sqn practices, I was consistently in the 2^nd enclosure and on the day before the race, one of the sergeants from my Sqn , a Khalsa (Sikh gentleman) threatened to make my life miserable for the next year if I didn’t come in the 2^nd enclosure on the final day. For all those people from NDA, you would know that a threat from your Sergeant is not something to be taken lightly. But on the other hand, a Sqn run and the final day is a whole different ball game. In the Sqn runs you are hardly 70-80 people, but with the entire academy it’s about 1000-1200 cadets in one go. I ran like my arse was on fire, literally, and when I ran into the enclosure and fell down retching, one of the PT Saabs came and thrust a token in my hand which said 17. I was a little confused. Didn’t only the top 15 get medals or had they increased it this time around and I didn’t know about it? I looked around and realized. HOLY COW I was in the 1^st enclosure. My joy knew no bounds, I think I ran like how Tom runs when chased by the dog in Tom and Jerry!! Anyways, I didn’t get a medal, it was only for the top 15. I tried every term hence and ran my heart out but only came 19, 20 & 22^nd but never got a medal. But I never gave up.

 In 2003, I was detailed to undergo the Flying Instructors Course at Tambaram, Madras. This was a course where you learn and train to be a flying instructor and teach cadets (the young entrants into the IAF) how to fly. This was a course which had a number of my coursemates and a smattering of juniors and a few seniors. I really wanted to prove myself in this course and the competition was quite tough. Finally when the battle lines were drawn and the competition progressed in right earnest, there were just two of us who Rohit Beri, a coursemate and a good friend who slugged it out for the top spot. And the competition was intense, especially in academics. This was because at the end of every test we knew everybody’s performance and where each stood unlike in flying where you are only told if you’ve passed or failed. So by the mid-term it was neck to neck, a see-saw battle between the two of us and Rohit was a very sharp and exceptionally hard working chap. Slowly but surely, like how you feel it in a tug of war when you are the weaker side, as you claw and cling and heave desperately yet feel the ground slipping beneath you, he pulled away, point by precious point in each exam. I managed to upstage him a few times but like a juggernaut, he rolled on and when the curtain was drawn on our performance after 6 months, he was the clear winner by about 10-12 points out of 1200. But, even in the last exam, when there was no hope that I could level or best him, I still gave it my best shot.

I don’t know if I should even be writing this, coz there has been many a slip between the cup and the lip in my life, but what the hell…. I recently relocated to Bangalore and after I joined at work found that a scuba diving camp at Andamans was going to be conducted for free a few months later. I had missed enrolling for the course by just a few days but I didn’t let that deter me. I went ahead and applied anyways. A month down the line and the list of people were announced. I was S’by No. 1. That meant that I would get a chance to go only if someone dropped out and fat chance of that happening. People had been waiting for a year for this course, it was literally like a paid holiday and nobody would drop out. After finalization, KP (my colleague who happened to be S’By No. 2) and I went to the office and found that only the main list people were going and the sports guys were actually giving back a fat sum of money but weren’t letting us go. This only galvanised us into action and we both dug our heels in, ferreted out the name of the civil official who had the power to let us join too, met her, charmed and convinced her and well would you believe it!! KP has already been there done the course, promised himself that he’s gonna go again… and I am waiting for the end of the month when I’ll become a convert too.. Insha Allah

There are so many more instances that I have but some are too personal and some too official for me to narrate here. And believe me there are so many instances of a colleague of mine Brij, which are so heart rending it could be an inspirational story to the youth of the nation, like the time he had to wrestle in school in a competition so that he could win the prize money to pay for his tiffin carrier and many many more. In most instances in my life, inspite of my whole hearted efforts I ve only come second best and watched the winner walk away with the laurels and like they say everybody loves a winner and nobody remembers who came second . Except the chap who came second himself. But its only kept me going, because I’ve read somewhere, only if you aim for the moon you will at least land up on top of the fence….

So stay hungry and stay foolish..