An Indecisive Indian

  Dr. Sudhanshu Mani I am no painter with a brush, nor a sculptor with a chisel in hand. I am just a humble novice in the cathedral of good art. Yet I do know how to cradle an idea, to carry it faithfully across the distance from thought to reality. It began, long ago, with the iron muse of my profession. In thirty-five years as an Indian Railways officer, the moment that etched itself deepest was not a groundbreaking project or a grand inauguration, but a quiet evening between Hindupur and Bangalore. There I sat, coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other, in the lookout glass of an inspection saloon, watching the world unfurl behind a racing train. The view was not a postcard, but a restless theatre: fields and dust, surging crowds and silent stretches, laughter, struggle, and stillness, all in one reel of light and shadow. I sat there bewitched, bewildered, almost chastened. What was I doing, gulping down this living poetry with my eyes and doing nothing about it? Art, after all...

Dr. Sudhanshu Mani There is one arena where Indian Railways (IR) has attained absolute, hyper-velocity godhood, effortlessly bypassing the laws of space and time: the legendary railway meeting . It is a majestic, wood-panelled ecosystem where time lies frozen in a perpetual red-taped coma, yet every officer somehow arrives late, the delay increasing in perfect proportion to rank. Around a massive teak table that has comfortably outlived governments, policies and certainly the issues under discussion, assemble the bigwigs. Standing in attendance is a battalion of peons, bearing endless trays of syrupy Sarkari chai, soggy Britannia biscuits and meticulously counted roasted almonds, except for the senior-most officers who, through administrative evolution, enjoy unlimited grazing rights. Together they debate why a train that left Dibrugarh sometime during the previous geological era has mysteriously vanished from the Control Chart and is yet to arrive anywhere, though two committees rem...