The Cage!

Image Courtesy: Google

It is a closed box with sliding doors that opens at regular intervals. It devours people in its belly and digests the fatigue and sweat of them and leaves the people squeezed like a mangle machine does. Here I am talking about the coaches of a metro train.

On a casual look, people hanging to the rods look like monkeys hanging to the rods in a cage. Packed to capacity, bodies get smashed to maximum limit. It is a miracle that you come out of it without dying of suffocation. When you get pressed heavily by other bodies, for a moment the breath seems to be deceiving you, but with grace of heavenly tolerance levels that Indians develop genetically, they resist these moments bravely. Gradually, the tough times of hard pressings pass by and a bit of space gets created when the train moves ahead.

Though the journey is far from a lovely experience, there seems hardly any grievance on the faces of commuters for a lack of comfortable journey. They are so deeply embattled with other problems that these perennial pushing and shoving have stopped to attract any attention. Like a flock of sheep they mount and alight the coaches, hardly ever thinking that they deserve a comfortable journey.

Any desire for improvement in the situation seems to have died down, though it is a fact that they are the same people who brought about a sea-change in the democratic horizon by forcing a long reigning party to abdicate the throne.

Warts and all, it is inhuman to see humans suffer from a plight that would give even animals a shudder down their spine.

But, with every chugging of the metro trains, life of the common person moves ahead as well and forgetting the wrestling of the morning he/she gets ready to wrestle again in the evening with the eagerness to reach home and meet that little daughter who is waiting for the father to bring chocolates and that stubborn son who wants only his mother to feed him.