My much deserved state of somnolence was rudely disturbed by the screaming and shouting of one of the fourteen people in the compartment. I thought someone had fallen off, and I woke up with a start, only to notice that this was how they woke each other up.

I wish to dear God that I had a shotgun that time. I’d have done a Kurt Cobain on myself.

I figured that I’d wait it out until they were done waking each other up so that noise levels would reduce, and I could go back to sleep, but they spoke so loudly that, were they in Necropolis, it would cease to remain so, with the dead waking up thanks to their irritatingly loud decibel levels.

I was, obviously thinking of savouring this experience so I could blog about it later, but I was soon getting to be at my wit’s end.

The train was late, and these fat ovesttuffed ladies and their uncontrollable children and teenagers were wreaking havoc, and even the loudest music on my ipod couldn’t drown them out.

There was no way I could go back to sleep even if I were injected with morphine, and so I stepped down from my lofty berth.

The side-upper berth was allocated to me since I was a waitlisted traveller, and those are the crappiest berths available on trains. They are so claustrophobic that they’d make the individual capsule in Japanese hotels look like rooms in the Leela Palace Hotel.

However, once I stepped down to sit at one of those window seats that I was rightfully supposed to sit at, five of those kids came and sat there, a couple of them barely old enough to read trying to flip through my book and being playful when I wasn’t in the best of moods.

A couple of those kids who were in their early teens were so fat that I thought twice before giving them dirty looks, lest they decided to punch me, in which case I’d have had a broken jaw in the very least.

I finally sought refuge at the doorway, where I could stand and view the ever changing landscape as the wind blew into my already unkempt hair, with music playing in my ears, and I was at peace temporarily.

Further attempts to go back up and sleep on the berth were futile, and I think that we need to torture prisoners using the sleep deprivation technique by putting them up with huge Marwadi families travelling on trains.

It was now that the train stopped at Guntakal, and I was still sleepless and getting more irritable by the minute, which was when I was inspired to come up with the title for this series of posts.

As the family finished breakfast and settled down, I thought it was over and I could read / sleep / sit silently and contemplate the passing scenery in peace while listening to music, but alas, my reverie was disturbed by the loud noises of eunuchs clapping.

As soon as they saw me, they knew instinctively that I was an easy target, and they hounded me for money. I was glad to partake with small change, but as the three of them present chose to gang up on me, I had no option but to shout and make a run for it in the compartment, shouting out loudly that I was a student and that I *actually* had no monies.

But eunuchs with crazy eyes who want money from ipod toting, shorts wearing, decent looking gentlemen would hardly care, and I think I escaped a near death traumatic experience thanks to my wailing like a banshee to get away from them. Such joy.

It was two hours past the time of arrival when the train arrived finally in Mysore, and I was thankful to have gotten back to where I once belonged.

I wish this had a more melodramatic ending, but life isn’t always a chick-flick, you see.

Indian Railways has, for me, over the years become synonymous with adventures.

If they would’ve introduced frequent train traveller cards with discount offers and such, I’d have been laughing all the way to the bank, or to wherever else these cards were valid.

My travel along the Jaipur – Mysore Express via Hyderabad was as eventful as it could get, with two near death experiences involving obese Marwadis and greedy eunuchs.

However, given my propensity towards meandering all over the place before I get down to actually narrating what I started off with, I must bring in some context.

Term 1 got over with the final exams ending at 1700 on tuesday evening, and I had decided that I would head back home soon after.

Most of my classmates who weren’t natives of Hyderabad did the same thing and all of them booked their flights, whereas I, being a self-proclaimed cheap guy had a reputation to live up to, and booked a train ticket for Mysore on the Jaipur Express in the second class sleeper compartment.

The second class sleeper was no longer the staple mode of travel once I had a little money in my pockets and I was travelling to places with unpleasant climates (living in Bangalore makes all other places’ climates look unpleasant by comparison), and consequently, I used to travel by AC.

However, being in debt makes you parsimonious as hell, and brings about a ‘paradigm shift’ in your approach towards frivolous expenditure. (Notice how sweetly I threw in the catch phrase there?)

Cut to Kacheguda railway station at 0100 hours early on wednesday morning, as the train chugged in more than an hour late, while I spent all that time listening to Jason Mraz’s ‘Geek in the Pink’ and ‘Wordplay’.

I went into the designated train bogie with my backpack, and I was greeted by the sight of fourteen people sprawled around in the one compartment of nine seats in which I was supposed to sleep in.

Each seat had two people, and there was luggage on the floor and I had a stunned look of disbelief writ large on my face, and the other fourteen people reciprocated the same feelings in kind, as we sized each other up.

“Have you lost your luggage?”, one of them asked me.

“No, this is all I have.”

Shocked facial expressions followed.

“Are you getting off at the next stop?”

“No, I am going all the way to Mysore.”

Following this exchange, they looked at me like I was a drunken bum, even though I had shaved cleanly because I didn’t want to give the people back at home the impression that I was being a hobo.

The romanticism associated with train journeys and bumping into different sorts of people was eroding fast as the overpowering odour of fourteen bodies in a space meant for seven, combined with their willingness to have a post-midnight snack at the drop of a hat came to the fore.

If these Marwadis didn’t travel with enough food to feed Alexander the Great’s army, maybe that bubble wouldn’t have burst.

However, two nights of not sleeping, and a long wait at the station had me exhausted beyond words, and I got on the top berth, lay my backpack down, and slept, a dreamless sleep.

To be continued…..

However, once the reality has set in, and we’ve become aware of the gravity of the situation, the customary distance we’d tend to keep from things happening in different parts of the country has not made itself evident this time around.

The terrorist attacks in Kashmir have not made our blood boil so much, or made so many of us spew vitriol in the way these Mumbai attacks have. The various attacks in our country have shaken us up, including the ones that took place in Jaipur, Ahmedabad, in our very own Bangalore as well as in Assam.

What happened in Bangalore was probably the scariest of them all personally, at least when the first reports of the explosions were reported. However, these fears were significantly assuaged when we were made aware of those blasts being low-intensity, and that a few bombs had been defused and significant damage to life and property had been averted.

However, none of these attacks has made us angrier as a collective people, than what is going on in Mumbai currently. No longer is the average Indian, let alone the average Mumbaikar speaking about the resilience of the city, and its ability to weather any storm and the innate nature of its people to be able to pull themselves together in the face of any adversity.

No longer is anyone speaking about how life will go on once these terrorists are flushed out from the Taj, the Trident and Nariman House.

One is under the distinctive impression that the Bombay that withstood the communal riots, the bomb blasts of 1993, the local train explosions of 2006 and the various other sporadic incidents of terrorism and violence has now finally reached the end of its tether. As a city, it is too great to be equated to a camel, and hence I’d like to refrain from using the last straw metaphor. (As a pertinent aside, I was born there in 1983)

What every Mumbaikar, nay Indian is demanding at this point in time is justice. We’re tired of being labelled a soft state, that will withstand the blows that these terrorists keep raining on us. We’re tired of being in a situation where we have to be on our guard at all times, being in fear of our lives at all times.

True, we’ve acquired some sense of bravado within us that keeps propelling us towards doing what we have to, as we go about saying to ourselves that what happens will happen, and we will face it when it does.

However, turning the other cheek just doesn’t seem to cut it. With all due respect to the Mahatma, I don’t think his ideals and principles were developed around trying to provide solutions against radical hardcore religious fanatics who seem to have adopted the motto of ‘kill and get killed’. Ostensibly, Gandhigiri will just not get us anywhere.

This sense of anguish and despair was epitomized by Shobhaa De’s scathing commentary against politicians and her anger at how security is diverted towards their protection while the common people are subject to open gunfire in the streets when they go about their daily activities. Her angry responses towards Barkha Dutt’s quesitoning on NDTV earned her a lot of respect last evening, and in a way, was representative of the feelings of most people in general.

We, as a people need to wake up and get better acquainted with collateral damage. It is not enough to engage in armchair philosophy, while we let someone else take the bullets to ensure that our need to get jungle-style justice is addressed.

When we engage in retaliation against the source of these terror attacks, and I sincerely hope to God that we do, we can expect them to hit back hard at us. Lives will be lost, businesses will suffer, and our general quality of life might take a beating for the worse. People we know, maybe even you and I, might be ridden with bullets or have our limbs torn apart due to explosives.

What we need to understand, and more importantly hope and pray, is that the possible short-term troubles we face due to any steps undertaken in response to the attacks on Mumbai in particular, and the terror strikes on our country in general might translate into the long-term good of all of us Indians as a people.

Right now, one can only wish for the ordeal in Mumbai to end, for the decisive next set of steps to be taken. Respect to those personnel who laid their lives down in the line of duty.