An Indecisive Indian

  The problem with us retired railwaymen, the same tribe that still thinks Indian Railways (IR) needs their counsel, is that we simply cannot see much good in IR today. People say we’re stuck in the past. The past which was pound-wise and penny-foolish. Yes, we’re traumatised by an era when we naively thought we did some jobs very efficiently with great accountability. In spite of this moronic sense of accountability, there were pinpricks galore. Like a certain tea-and-snacks grant whose monthly limit was guarded more fiercely than the Kohinoor. In those days, serving tea to visitors on official account was an exercise in administrative tightrope-walking. Offer one extra cup, and the grant evaporated. Offer too few, and your guest felt neglected. And heaven forbid you dared to serve biscuits —that was a luxury that required both courage and signed justification. We also lived under the constant threat of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) telephone, that innocent-lo...

  It is 22 nd  November 2025 today, and it has now been more than seven years since the prototype Train 18, now christened Vande Bharat, rolled out of the Integral Coach Factory gates for the very first time. The thrill, pride, and sheer magic woven by the ICF core team, whom I was fortunate enough to lead, have been recounted by me and others many times: in talks, in print, and in quiet conversations when memory lent colour and verve to bare facts. Yet, strangely, despite living and breathing that project for years, I had never travelled on it as a passenger. Except for the test runs of 2018, I had only experienced the train from the vantage of its maker, not its customer. Somewhere deep inside, I always knew that my real journey with Vande Bharat would happen silently, unannounced, without ceremony or spotlight, just me melting anonymously into its rhythm. I had resolved that this ride would happen organically and not as a planned exercise. Life, as always, had other...

  Disclaimer: What I write today is a modified version of this blog: https://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-great-irms-hoopla-from-backbones-to.html Four years ago, the Indian Railways Management Service (IRMS) was launched with great fanfare, its ambition pitched as high as a mountain peak: to fuse eight quarrelsome railway services into one harmonious brotherhood and finally banish the ancient ghost of departmentalism . But the lofty vision soon sprouted cracks wide enough to run a Bullet train through without slowing down. After a circus of somersaults that would make seasoned acrobats weep with professional envy, the government hit the reset button and returned to the familiar embrace of separate Civil and Engineering Services Examinations (CSE and ESE) for induction of officers—an old habit burnished as a breathtaking innovation. And to crown the absurdity, the buzzword IRMS —a term that somehow meant everything and nothing—was not retired but triumphantly retain...

  When news surfaced that China had tested its new-generation CR450 trains, social media went into hyperdrive. Facts and fiction whizzed past each other faster than the trains themselves. The wildest claim? That China had achieved a speed of 896 kmph. Well, no — this isn’t a MagLev. The CR450 runs on wheels, and wheels doing 896 kmph would be less “train” and more “missile on holiday”. In reality, the 896 kmph was the combined relative speed when two CR450s crossed paths during testing; the highest actual speed clocked was 453 kmph. Still, the train’s planned operating speed of 400 kmph will make it the fastest wheel-on-rail service on Earth. (China’s record-holding 432 kmph MagLev, after all, floats above the rails.) Even at 400 kmph, the feat is awe-inspiring — and, for us Indians, a little painful. For while China streaks ahead, our own Mumbai–Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail (HSR) project has spent nearly a decade still trying to leave the station. While India had debated and ...

  I recently wrote in this blog, https://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2025/09/awarded-rewarded-and-thoroughly.html that there are many folks like me, sporting a few half-plucked feathers in our caps, who periodically get invited to be both honoured and humiliated at the same time. Honours for lesser mortals like me are like confetti, pretty, harmless, and soon swept away or worse still, like those glittery party-balloons that hover for a while, bobbing smugly above your head, and then, at the precise moment you try to look dignified, they slip, explode, and leave you with a face full of helium and the smell of fried samosas. My many experiences involved an invitation to be both bedizened and bemused, lauded and at once mortified in public, a ceremonial two-step I’ve come to call “the garlanded casualty” waltz, a dance I now perform with the grace of an arthritic ballerina and the resignation of a government file. I have, therefore, with time, become a trifle philosophical too an...