I had to visit Palakkad’s train station the other day to pick up my parents and thats when I realised how long it had been since I set foot there, visited a train station, passed a Higginbotham store that used to be the highpoint of my train journeys back then. The sounds and smells (ok, not very pleasant, not gonna glorify that…) didnt beam me back to the past as much as make me aware of how much life had moved ahead. My parents still insisted on travelling by train, refusing to crunch their travel time from three days to three hours, they said they were comfortable this way.
I wasn’t exactly rolling in the greens when I was booking my tickets for my Kerala trip a few weeks back and given the recent upsurge in flight fares, shelling out 24 grand for a trip for two for Mumbai-Coimbatore-Mumbai seemed a tad much. We had shelled out 18 grand four months back for a trip for two that involved Mumbai, Goa, Cochin and Calicut. Yet, whatever my economic state, whatever the time of the month, I just cannot think of travelling by train anymore. Perhaps I should…
binduiswriting
