'Izzat' on Wheels

Didi chugged and puffed her way through in 'Hengali' (Mamata Banerjee's curious brand of Hindi, English, Bengali), words running into one another, grammar taking a tumble, pronunciation flying past your head, and yet the Mamata Express sped on, dropping budet nuggets at every station.... and 'shairi' in 'Hengali' - truly pioneering!

It never amazes me how generations of our successive Railway Ministers and Finance Ministers don the garb of conjurors on B-Day, pulling out one pigeon after the other from their bag of goodies. A flourish, a pithy comment ('jindagi ka safar ijjat se suru hota hai......, etc. etc.') and voila, one more gift out of the goody bag. Conveniently, this time around there were no price tags to the gifts - no fare hikes, no freight increases - and it was that much easier to have 'izzat' (or ijjat); 'turant' (sounding tantalizingly 'toronto') and mobile vans (spoken 'bhains'; and you scratched your head trying to picture how huge black bovines got onto this budget track!) roll off the Minister's tongue and play music to our ears.

It sounds like a dream come true (or, to be precise, about to come true). Clean trains, clean loos, world-class stations, Rs. 25/- season tickets, non-stop superfasts and what-have-you. Interestingly, she spoke of puctuality. Ha, I smirked, sure. Travelling on Swiss trains and trains in the UK, you witness a degree of punctuality to almost a nano second. In London, I could not get over my disbelief when station tickers flashed 'XXX Down to London Bridge will arrive 10 seconds late at this station'. 10 seconds? Are these folks paranoid? In India we think nothing of trains running 10 hours late... with no one to inform us as well; the crummy 'enquiry counter' window shutter tells the story at station after station across the country.

Great, if we can look forward to even a fraction of all that that popped out of the goody bag this morning. Hard to keep the cynicism and scepticism at bay, given our experiences with political pronouncements. Or, to keep the hopes up when things begin well and then water down to abject levels (travelled lately on some of the Shatabdis, or tried something from Lalu's much touted rail kitchen? - you'll know what I mean).

So, this budget is about giving 'izzat' to the 'aam aadmi' - the 'aam aadmi' who started straying to low cost airlines in the hope of getting a fast, clean, slightly snazzy ride for his hard-earned buck. Will he come back to the 'lifeline of the nation' in the hope of restored izzat that translates to a clean coach (music, A/C plus, plus?), non-smelly toilet, a ticket that doesn't burn a hole in the already frayed pocket, a tantalizing array of new trains criss-crossing and connecting 'hometowns' with urban migrant destinations and clean, non-greasy rail 'thalis'?

Mushkil aache? Let's see......