Banglore part 1

It was a great trip to Bangalore. Short and exciting never the less. I have been to that place before. It is pretty metropolitan not in the sense that it is very populated but also in terms of the way people live there. About half of the white collared job-holders population is migrants from other state. Though there are people from everywhere, a majority of them from the eastern and north-eastern part of India. Most of them have made it their home owing to lack of job opportunities in their hometowns. The city is well maintained and growing. There is a decent civil sense that prevails. Best thing is that due so many migrants this city is multi-linguistic. I can go around speaking Hindi or English. Mostly everyone understands English.

I left from Howdah station on 6th March. My train was scheduled to depart at 8.30 in the evening and thankfully it did. It is always a new experience to visit howdah as at every hour of the day and (most part of the night) there are people moving around. Just be there for one day and you will be amazed at the number of people that come into the city and go out of the city everyday. It is the gateway through which nearly a hundred trains carrying thousands of people and tones of goods come and leave. My coach was at the very end of the platform. Thankfully I wasn’t carrying too much of luggage. I was just standing in front of the coach and suddenly I heard a loud shriek of a lady. I turned back only to find that a thief had snatched the necklace of the lady and was running. The thief was well dressed (at least not rags as I just got a glimpse from a fair distance). There are pros and cons of escaping in a crowded place. Either you are not able to penetrate through the crowd or can get lost in the crowd. What happened to that guy is not known to me. Anyways, I got into the train and it was pretty much empty though I know it was fully reserved (It was full when I went to get the ticket). I got into the train and was waiting for someone from the pantry car to come and tell me that there was dinner available, because I hadn’t brought anything and I wouldn’t find a thing at the stations where the train would halt (at least not at this hour.) So after half an hour finally a couple of them did come up. Though, they didn’t bring anything for selling. But they said that they could get me vegetarian meals. Pantry car was far off (about 12 coaches) so it did take a lot of time. In the mean time I was chatting with one of the caterer guy. It was interesting to know about the life of these people. They are allotted a train for a season i.e. they will keep traveling on the same train for a period of about 3 or months. Their day begins at 3.30 am and ends at around 11 pm. The train leaves at 8.30 pm and they get in at around 6 pm and start preparing the food for dinner. Due to lack of berths to sleep they have to sleep on the floors on the pantry car and the passengers who get on the stations may have to cross the pantry car to reach their respective coaches so they can get to sleep at 12 midnight (after a particular station passes). Then they have to get up at 3.30 am and start the preparations for breakfast. They have to keep up with the schedule that they have to prepare about 6 or 7 items. They are done with the preparations for breakfast by 7 am. They start serving out things by 5 am as things get completed. Out of experience they have a decent assumption about the amount of the vegetarian food that they can expect to get ordered for. So they start preparing that by 7.30. They then send out caterers to get order for lunch. They have a decent enough idea about the order for non-vegetarian also but since it is more expensive so they better get orders beforehand so that there is no shortage of wastage. As the people are given breakfasts the orders are collected by 9 am by which time they are done with making the rice and vegetarian curry. Then as per the orders they make the rest of the food. This activity is over by 12 noon and they start packaging and dishing out the orders by 1 pm. Thereafter they eat whatever is left over or else they just boil some rice and eat that with curry. Within an hour of them having their lunch they start taking orders for dinner. They start making snacks for the evening till the order arrives and then while the snacks are being sold, they start making the dinner. They are done with the dinner by 7 pm and they dinner is distributed by 8 pm. Then they have their dinner eating the leftover and rice. They set up everything for the next day and then go to sleep by 11 pm and again get up by 4 am for the tea coffee that they serve the next day. The most interesting thing came at the end when he told me that they don’t work by clock but by the train station that comes along the way. For example they are supposed to finish the job A by the time the train reaches the station X. So they are always aware of which station has just passed and they can slow down a little when they know that the train is running late. What makes their job more tedious (though I would call it interesting and exciting) is the different kind of people that they need to serve. All kinds of people travel in the train and they get used to reading the nature of people and then accordingly talk to them. All in all I rate it as a very difficult job and frankly passenger who talk about them don’t quite consider them to be hard working and associate the same kind of lethargy they associate with the government employees. But these people are unfazed with that. They only know one thing and that is to sell as much food as they can and they work hard towards that. Of course they accomplish something that is not easy to think, preparing and serving food on train day in and day out on the largest railway network in the world. More so they meet the people of India in all their diversity.