August 21, 2005

The Metro Reloaded

Dunno if I posted about my first ride on the Delhi Metro, so am recapping the experience in ten words: what fun inside sparkling clean belly of fast moving dragon.

Yesterday was round two of Metro-ing, and oh! What a disappointment! The train was empty from Central Secretariat to Kashmere Gare, but there were vicious mosquitoes and a fly! A young lady was carefully combing her tresses, and some of her hair was falling to the floor of the compartment. She’s doing her bit to make the Metro get used to its adoptive parent-city.

At Kashmere Gate, we witnessed the wonderful sight of hundreds of commuters jumping on to a train, being herded with a lathi by a furiously whistling guard. The Metro has already fallen short of space! How much can the frequency be increased without making the train a continuous chain of bogeys from Delhi University to Central Secretariat?

Grateful that we were not on that crowded train, and dreading the return journey when we would be, we climbed a gazillion steps to take the overhead Metro to Shastri Nagar. The boring gray steps of the escalator have been livened up with paan juice art. Once over the ground, the Metro is a whole new story where cleanliness is a rapidly disappearing virtue, and new heights of uncouth behaviour are crying out to be reached.

Visitors to our city, whom we were trying to impress with our Metro, must have loved the view of the city from the train: Delhi looked like a cross between Armageddon, The War of The Worlds, and Godzilla.

Mercifully Joker Anna, the tourist who was with us, was more interested in buying souvenir tickets, and a ten-minute wait to obtain the same from an empty counter kept him occupied.

On the way back, there was eve-teasing on the crowded train.

Hail Delhi! Thou Shalt Conquer All!

8 comments:

Jade said...

Heh! Couldn't believe he actually bought souvnier tokens! :D

Anonymous said...

.hmmmmm...." kolkotha"

is that a typo or a freudian slip ??

Calcutta is surely a kotha...if you know what i mean.

or then...did the bongs again change the name ??

phucker said...

Three things that make you a typical delhi-ite(please take with requisite amounts of sodium chloride)

1) The cribbing - whether justified or not

2) The eve-teasing - why didn't you try and stop it?

3) The crowded train. Only a Delhi-ite will refuse to wait the additonal 4 minutes for another train, if the current one is full.

Anonymous said...

Blokes --> Do you work in the Kolkata municipality? Cuz that was the last time that they checked the state of the metro as well :D

Stone said...

with the type of security checks they have, it is a "Tragedy waiting to happen"!!!

heretic said...

They haven't got to M2M groping levels yes--needless to add, the Delhi Metro has a few more years to go the Mumbai way. :))

Come to think of it, the buggers took the money away from MUTP and spent it on a delhi metro. :o Loved the paan art bit--they're gonna introduce it in the 2016 New Delhi Olympics as a new event. We'll surely beat the chinese at it.

San said...

ah the closest I've got to seeing the metro was in that bolly movie bewaffa ..

Hornswoggler said...

So the Dalli has conquered the metro? Now why do I hear the 'Kolkothans' laughing?