Saturday, January 26, 2008

Characters in the train

In my train commute, I've come across quite a few characters. But from what I saw in the last week, the following blokes stand out:
1. The guy who boarded the train one stop after mine and took up the aisle seat in the row opposite mine (I had the window seat). He removed his shoes after 2 minutes. And since the train was empty, he stretched his legs on to the vacant aisle seat in my row. For the kind of stench that emanated from his feet, it is indeed a miracle that I didn't faint!
2. Another day, there was a guy who was actually singing throughout the trip. I am not talking about the beggars who board the train and sing for alms. This was a regular commuter who was singing the songs being fed directly into his tympanum from his iPod clone. Some might hum, but not this guy. He was really singing. And doing a bad job at that.
3. One morning, I was waiting for the train near my usual area on the platform - this is near a newspaper/magazine stall. There was a cleaning lady going about her business of sweeping the dust. She was getting close to the stall and so I moved further away to avoid the dust. But, there was a woman at the stall buying something. Once the transaction was completed, she decided to go her way. But there was this cleaning lady and the pile of dust that she was dragging along, directly in that woman's path. Anyone would have changed course, but not this lady. She preferred walking through that pile rather than deviate from her track. A likely candidate for some management opening.
4. There is always one couple (not the same couple) who are quite chummy inside the compartment. No "bad" activities per se, but they generally tend to be sharing one seat!
5. I travelled with a couple of friends 2 days back, in the general compartment. I noticed that some of the folks have a habit of buying any edible product that was sold. In fact, at one point, some of them had white channa sundal, onion samosa and peanuts - all procured from 3 different vendors.
6. Many people do not worry about travelling in the wrong class. I probably sound snobbish, but 8 out of 10 times, its easy to know which second class guy is travelling by first class. Early this week, I made a mental note of 2-3 such people in the crowd and promptly enough, there was a ticket checker who caught them and 2 more for this offence.

There are many more such entities and I plan to note down the same in these chronicles!

1 comment:

Ramadurai said...

What you say is in local train. Get in at Central and you see more funny characters in Long distance trains or over night trains
1. Sleepless oldies! - They never want to switch off the lights
2. Cranky teenagers! - Want to keep talking oblivious to surroundings
3. Interesting one for you! - When everybody goes to sleep , young pair move towards common area where there is no berth or seat!!!(please understand!) and they do not have sleep after that!
4. Waking up the entire bogey or the entire train! - Same oldies wake up @3AM when the train chugs in to another station that is 2 hours apart from destination