Travel o travel o travel - Covering the miles all 1835 of them !

The next day started with a flight out at 730 a.m. from Bombay to Calcutta to be followed by a 3:30 hour train journey from Calcutta to Jamshedpur. Since I had to get to Jamshedpur from Bombay a distance of  1835 km according to google maps, the best way was to actually take the flight to Calcutta ( 2:45 hours) followed by a 3:30 hour journey by train. There were a couple of variables here, one the journey between Dum-Dum and Howrah and the infamous traffic jams on Howrah Bridge and the second was the company that one would get in a sleeper class compartment on the train journey to this place. The first variable was pretty well handled by a competent local cabbie and the journey ended up taking only 1:10 minutes of the alloted 3 hours.

Howrah is one of those huge stations that you love to travel from - well planned with 23 full sized platforms and 4 more planned with each set of 4 platforms has 2 service roads , so folks after the payment of a fee can *actually* alight next to their compartment (no there are no 'a' and 'b' type platforms as in the UK). It is the largest station that I have travelled from and I suspect one of the largest stations in India but no one seems to be able to confirm this suspicion.

Taking the train in a 2nd class sleeper compartment (for those who don't know what these are see the linked photograph though look at the compartment behind the kingfisher.) was an experience after nearly 8 long years . I had forgotten the experience of being seated in a heated tin-can with the sights and the smells of the country-side or urban area that you were going through. Ofcourse the fun bit was in the various cries of caffee cafee or chai jhai and looking out of the window seated in a forward facing seat ! The cheap thrills of looking out of the window on a curve in the tracks to spot the locomotive or the tail of the 24-25 compartment long train are unmatcheable. The company on this trip was a cute little kid who was hell-bent on teaching me ABCD and counting numbers from 1-100. This was interspersed by a few attempts to throw out the latest Frederick Forsyth novel that I was reading .

In the middle of this , the kid also managed to read the book by flicking through the pages, cheated on a spelling game and checked if I could spell G-A-P . Just when you thought that the temperature was reaching it's heights and you would continue to swelter it was time for a refreshing summer shower.

It's remarkable how many times nature manages to cool things down especially one when is going through a really hot summer afternoon, if it were the UK I would have cursed the rain given that we only seem to get a lot of it and it would surely interfere with my cricket game ! , but here it was fresh, pleasant and the smell of fresh rain on what had been a hot muggy and sweltering afternoon was extremely refreshing. The biggest advantage of travelling in a second class compartment is the ability to actually take in the weather, the sights and the smells of the places you go through. It can be tepid, boring and quite ghastly in some of the urban areas but that's all made up by the smell of the first rains hitting a parched ground but if you really want to travel through India there are no places better than a seat in a super-fast second class compartment with the odd forays to the door of the compartment to sit down and soak up the scenery. Soon enough it was time to alight the train at Jamshedpur to be welcomed by the gang of 5 who made sure that everyone at the station knew that I had arrived with garlands, placards, a homemade director of events and quite a few noisy statements .This sometimes begs the question - with friends like this .... I leave it as homework for the astute reader to finish ......