Train back home!

Tripoto
21st Aug 2018
Photo of Train back home! by Mansi Middha
Day 1

“Sometimes the light at the end of a tunnel is a train”

For a person who’s been away from home most of their life, train journeys have always been bittersweet experience. From checking your PNR to see if the ticket is confirmed, upgraded ( yeah it happens sometimes) or still in waiting to bribing the TT (Yep, I have done things I am not proud of), to praying that the “window seat passenger” doesn’t turn up, to missing a train, to settling for the Non-AC coach. As a regular train traveller, I have had all of these experiences.

When you live away from home, just getting on the train feels like you are halfway there, it’s comforting, it’s exciting and almost always interesting or irritating in some way.

Many a times when things have been going downhill, one of the best ways of coping with it has simply just been to get on a train and go back home. Not only does it take you home, the train ride gives you time to think to reflect and almost always the perspective to look at the brighter side of things.

A train ride gives you a clear picture of what life really looks like, literally and metaphorically. It takes you through the most picturesque landscapes, sunsets, farmlands, lakes.......to the new developing multi-storey constructions, to the poverty stricken suburbs with children defecating in the open.

The train journey in itself is a eye opener, a pause from the hectic lives that we are living, to just stop and be nowhere and have nothing else on the schedule but just the journey itself.

It truly is sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel.