Railways: A window to real India

The window seat is special to everyone who wishes to tour India by rail. While boarding an empty train, people's first preference is a window seat. When a window seat gets vacated, people are drawn into a rat race to occupy it and they are not willing to lend it at the cost of delight offered by other seats.

What makes the seat so special? Window seats offer visual treats. They have the power to pacify one’s bad state of mind. For the dream-seekers, the window seat proves to be an important site of attraction. Visualisation of dreams through window seats has been epitomised by movies.

A person occupying a window seat has a totally different state of mind than the rest of the passengers. After starting the journey a window seat traveller may get lost somewhere in an imaginary world hatched by one’s inner self, travelling beyond the bounds of the present into the future in search of something, or lost in the past. Window seat travel makes a perfect way towards creativity by emancipation of thoughts over the horizon of constraints.

A window seat coupled with a cup of tea constitutes an excellent recipe for creative thinking unless the cup of tea paints your suit in brown by the quake owing to alternate switching of railway track. Once you occupy a window seat, you'll get lost in reveries. The gusting of air crowding the iron bars, a blare of friction created by the well-refined polishing of wheels over the rail, lush green woods making the real call of the wild, majestic roar of the engine as the king on the track.

Apart from these virtualities, there are certain realities. The railway window seat is blessed with uniqueness as it is the only vantage point for measuring the length and breadth of our nation and the only place where you will get a chance to observe the reality of India — tracts of land reeling under the hot sun, people crossing the rail merely for sake of subsistence, scores of employees rushing through the risky track for making an early bird at the office.

Moreover, slumps abutting the railway tracks are a conspicuous insight into India’s urban divide. Besides the window seats award an opportunity to lend a hand to needy passengers, by bridging the gap between the vendors outside and the passengers inside. When the train is passing through a curved track, take some time to look back and you will realise the ultimate reality that you are caught inside the compartment of the largest Indian mobile snake.