Trip Up North - Part 1: The Train Journey

This entire Christmas season has been sortofa blur... But an amazing and an awesome one at that. So I'm gonna blog about it in parts..............

On December 22nd, my parents were to meet up with Smitha's parents at their place in Baroda. So I decided to make my way up there directly from Bangalore, while my parents were trudging up there from Chennai.

I caught the train at 21.50 hrs on Saturday, the 20th of December from the main station in Bangalore, Bangalore Central. It seemed like it was going to be another one of those long, boring journeys. So I was armed with another Star Wars book (Tyran't Test, one I hadn't yet read) and a copy of Billy Graham's biography. The last was a Christmas present given to me at church and I was looking forward to reading it during the trip up north. I had also copied some fresh MP3 tracks to my phone (WOW Worship red, WOW Worship green, WOW Worship yellow, Sandi Patty's 2008 release, Songs for the Journey) and I was determined to make the most of the 30+ hours that I was to spend on the train.

Soon as I got into my seat, I noticed a guy being spoken to in Malayalam, sitting in one of the side berths. I was like Yet another Mallu? Wow. Nothing wrong with mallus - I know plenty of 'em and many of my good-est friends are mallu. Just that it never ceases to surprise me that they're there everywhere! And I mean, EVERYWHERE!!! Anyways, there was also this young gal sitting opposite me, looking totally scared and lost and alone. Since I seldom make conversation with strangers while travelling, I let both the other youngsters in my coupe keep to themselves and plugged in to some nice music on my phone. An uneventful evening came to an end with me pushing off to bed, underneath the cover of my favourite comforter. (Yep - I brought that along for the trip!)

The next morning, when I was a little bugged, I began the Billy Graham biography. It was decent reading, although not very captivating in its writing style cos it's written for Young Readers... Me, I like a little more meat on the bones, if you know what I mean. I kept overhearing snatches of conversation between this guy and the gal, but nothing seemed very interesting. Up until the gal went off somewhere and I saw the book that she had been reading - a fantasy novel. Now, if you know me at all, you'd know that the Fantasy genre is my favourite. The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Rift War Saga, The Inheritance Cycle, The Harry Potter series, The Black Magician Trilogy..... all top the list of my favourite book series' of all time. This being the case, I was interested in finding out what this new fantasy novel was all about. When the girl returned, we started chatting. Truly speaking, the rest was history.

I found out that the girl, RM, studies at the Christ College in Bangalore, and this was one of her first times on a train. Imagine that. The guy, AP, was working for Vodafone in Bangalore as an engineer. Both were mallus, though they were settled outside. We had a decent time of chatting and sharing our interests, likes, and dislikes. Books (AP doesn't read!), music, movies, life... I told them about Smitha. AP told us about his girl, while RM said she doesn't want a guy in her life for quite some time. :)

All in all, God brought together three virtually unknown people so that a normally mundane and boring train journey turned into something more. Not too much, just a little bit more. We kept on chatting late into the night and finally decided to call it quits when RM kept falling asleep during conversation-lulls. Lol. Of course, we exchanged our orkut account details and stuff like that. :-)

One thing we did do more - we all got off the train at Pune since RM had never been off the train and was dying to get out. We spent considerable time walking 'round on the platform. I then pulled out my phone to snap up some pics of those historic moments (historic since it would never happen again!) and this is what we got:
AP and RM

RM and moi


Then AP took out his N-series phone and snapped a couple, too. We got these, then:

RM and moi

AP and RM

I really don't know exactly how I should categorise the train journey. Happy? Satisfying? Enjoyable? Something like that. Basically, when you're gonna be all-bored-out on a 30+ hour journey, it helps to make friends and chat 'em up.

Thank you, God. You really are marvellous and amazing!

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