The Chug Chugs are very distinct, its a huge metal thing on wheel rolling on parallel tracks as long as i remember i have been near these tracks,well my home was near the station in kasargod in northern Kerala and later on when we shifted to a new house ,there too was the railway track not very far from it......
i have always been mesmerized by the train....for me trains meant going away from studies and staying away from school.....so it was always fun and we used to travel all the way from kasargod to Ernakulam it took ten hours but the joy was unlimited ......all the people on the station seemed to be so happy on the sight of the train chugging into the station that there would be a sudden buzz......there would be the shrill calls of chai-chai or kaapikaaapi kapi..but the best part would be those who would sell idli vadas my all time favourite not because i loved idlis but i just could not resist buying them as this made me feel like i was a regular traveler and not some once in a blue moon traveler, it made me feel happy...
but the best thing was the cartoon books from phantom to tinkle from mandrake to superman all were sold at shornur and calicut, we have to beg amma to get us those and i would make it a point that i would carry them to school just to let my friends know that i had the latest ones brought from calicut. Returning from Ernakulam was always something we dreaded as we would have ot go back to school, but our incentives to go back were either shoes bought form king's shoe mart in M.G road or toys bought from Paico, we just could not wait to show it to our friends.
For as long as i can remember my father used trains to commute in trains for work daily,then there were those years were he would be posted to so far off place that he would only come home by 11 in the night only to leave by the next morning train as early as 5:30, but this was never a strict schedule as trains were always late except for the morning ones, there were days when he would be home only for a few hours, we were never told about the troubles he went through to be with his family but he always had fascinating stories to tell us, that is why i admire him for all the effort he has taken to be with us even if that meant to be only for a few hours except for Sundays were we would always go out for dinner, but it was in trains that he spent many a hours just trying to make it easy for us and not to miss him even if it is just for a few hours.
Today as i travel by train i still am mesmerized by the whole system that is in place, the amount of people it carries and the expectations it carries along with it, those glory days of train journeys are slowly being replaced by flight travels, but i still have this dream of travelling on a train without knowing exactly were i am going with nothing more than a bag and camera snapping those moments that come along in a journey which one may never get to experience in a plane journey, the vastness that a train covers is simply amazing the terrain changes every few hours one moment you would be passing through green fields on either side of the track, a few hours later you would be in the midst of a dry barren land where the heat would make your eyes burn.
One day surely i would just want to pack my bags and just go.....experience the smells and sights and capture a few in my camera, but i hope those days there still would be those same characters that my father had mentioned you would come across in a journey as i know that would in some way shape the way you would think and react to situations in life, as more than any other class a compartment would be the best class to meet and learn, all are together and all have destinations to reach and nothing can replace that experience about different people from different walks of life....i still would like to wake up to chug chugs and whistles of the morning passenger but sadly as easy it sounds we hardly get those days now.
