I think I had spoken too soon.
About how unsafe it was increasingly becoming . Travelling by train, that is. And that was with regard to what thugs on trains could do to you. They now have a free rein on trains, particularly when the trains are passing through Bihar. This has been that way for far too long now and we've more or less come to expect the worst when trains enter Bihar.
But what thugs can do to you pales to insignificance to what can happen to you or the entire train if just a few nuts and bolts or a fishplate go missing from a part of the tracks.
The scale of mayhem and disaster that can happen and as happened, twice on the same day, leaves the country gasping in utter disbelief. The twisted bogies lying helter skelter with untold dead and dying, limbs torn from bodies flung around like so much ghastly waste is numbing to the senses.
And when, quite understandably, the nation's psyche seeks an answer and a person in power to turn to, he plays truant like a schoolboy cutting school and hides behind a plethora of lame excuses. What a sorry state of governance we have!
And then when I know that the Pujas are on the way and people would be travelling I shiver in fear thinking how many more such gruesome accidents are waiting to happen. Just around the corner.
In fact my wife and I are already booked to travel to Delhi to holiday with my son and daughter-in-law. Should I cancel the train tickets and get air tickets, I wonder. The first knee-jerk reaction that comes to my mind when I think of travelling is what? On a train? Not me!
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