Earlier this week I had to make a short trip by train. While the onward journey was uneventful, the return journey was not so. I boarded a long distance train that was in its last leg. The compartment was packed. Among my co-passengers was one particularly vocal chap who was yakking from the time he boarded the train.
A few minutes into the journey I spied a well fed spider hurrying across from one side of the coach to the other. Fifteen minutes later a couple of cockroaches peeped out from behind the berth - as though they were ticketless travellers looking out for the ticket collector !!
And it felt like I was in the zoo when I spied a small rat rush past between bags and across the coach. I pointed out the new comer to the co-passengers. That was the trigger for our vocal friend to start. He obviously started with the topic of cleanliness in railway coaches, moved on to how they were fleecing passengers.
Most of us were in agreement with the points he started with but he did not seem to be in any mood to stop. The middle aged man who had woken up from his slumber went back to sleep - or at least pretended to. The pretty girl with the glasses hid behind a girly magazine. The rest of us stopped making eye contact with the hero and started fiddling with our mobile phones /looking at the scenery whiz past us.
Ending with a scathing comment of Mamta Banerjee - who incidentally has no ministers in the cabinet now, he promptly proceeded to eat a banana and throw the peel on the floor of the compartment !
Well so much for all the cleanliness talk. If this is the way we behave in a public space and have no civic sense, we do not deserve any better than the company of harried spiders, shy cockroaches and nervous rats on our train journeys - what do you say ?
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