असुविधा के लिए खेद है
If you have ever travelled in the majestic INDIAN RAILWAYS you already know even a South Indian with hindi-phobia will also understand what it means in 1st hour, spell it out in 2nd hour & fluently pronunciate it by 3rd. After 3rd hour Railway rules state you can take your money & fuck off (pdf link from IRCTC)
IT.
WAS.
CORE MEMORY.
You started 48 hrs before with typical “packing” watching your dad in exasperation arguing with mom wtf will 10 sarees/suits will do for a 5 day trip. On the day of journey, boy, would you wake up early for no reason at all excited for the day has come finally; dad will make everyone hurry so as to reach at least 1 hour before scheduled departure of the said train. Only to be welcomed with announcement
ट्रेन नंबर उल जलूल फलाना ढीकाना एक्स्प्रेस अभी 2 घंटा देरी से चल रही है; इसके यहां हड्डी बजकर चमड़ा मिनट पर आने की संभावना है. आपको हुई असुविधा के लिए हमें खेद है
End of happy part. Now my watch begins.
for vigil was eternal, as the hours kept passing by, the delay continued to increase (more so in winters) until being bleary eyed with lack of sleep questioning the sanity of it all broken by
यात्रीगण कृपया ध्यान दीजिये
गाड़ी संख्या ऊल जलूल फलाना ढीकाना एक्स्प्रेस कुछ ही समय में प्लेटफॉर्म क्रमांक 3 पर आ रही है
surely you will be anywhere but platform no. 3 at that time so mad rush will begin.
As with everything, with times things change & finally somebody in railway got brainwave let’s allow passengers to track their train! Back in 2006 they started the experiments with it & somewhere around 2007 onwards things started to change. Trainenquiry.com was launched in new avatar & finally people really knew where their train really was sitting.
Then came the revelation: trains delay timing announcement were (for lack of better word) heavily understated. A train running 6 hours late from 6 stations back will be shown to cover the delay in a progressive manner in subsequent stations predicted arrival timings, something impossible to actually do in Indian Railways (except the legendary raat me cover kar legi). The meaning of this discovery was obvious, for years we played like damn fiddle by railways sitting in cold waiting for train relying on false hopes.
So if announcement said delayed by 1 hour, Trainenquiry.com showed 4 hrs late at that time. The smartasses like us began to rely more on the website & it took a while to get dad onboard to it as well (dad it’s legit, it’s from govt website!)
Sometime later in 2014 the NTES app was bundled to play store & then things became interesting.
First a lot more common people started using it & as with what happens everything to what is good in India when masses walk in, it happened to NTES also. First it started as bitching: people screaming crying over incessant delays on social media. Railways responded by being tone deaf to it. People answered with mass media, sifarish & every pressure tactic in book & off it. Finally someone decided to put accountability to train timings, albeit only at final station arrival time.
Final time of arrival, now that’s the key detail between the lines. It meant basically you can your train can get as much as delayed you can have until it reached destination station with no/reasonable delay. So how do you do that?
First approach, just fake it: many recorded stances in early years of NTES showed a train having reached destination station when train was nowhere near it. The most common culprit were train with destination stations in NCR. It took a while for higher authorities to straighten this cracked approach.
Second approach was far more elegant, probably learnt from one of a major Indian airlines. You see if you keep destination station sceduled timing as late as possible accommodating the usually expected delay, your train might not officially be even delayed at all. Third Approach was to adjust the timings in between important stations (variation of 2nd approach).
Enter passenger now in this already chaotic situation. S/He does not cover the entire length of journey & for bonus, needs to switch to another train to complete the journey with a dash of changing the station as well. Now you have the perfect recipe for a storm.
So how does a passenger plan his travel? We will dwell on this on next chapter…
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