Food may have been privatized. This is when I started looking at the e-catering website in hopes something of the local cuisines must have been incorporated. All I could find were Haldirams and Dominos on the menu. That is when I decided to write this obituary to train journeys as I remember.
My last train ride was about 10 years ago. It was a last-minute decision to attend a close friend’s wedding. So, we boarded a sleeper class, because nothing else was available, and thus we started our journey from Delhi to Nagpur.
Since my childhood, a train ride meant trying different foods at each station. From eating vada pao or dabeli in a Maharashtrian station to chaat somewhere in Madhya Pradesh, or peda at Agra, the entire ride meant trying scrumptious foods at each station till our stomachs exploded. If nothing else, compare the chai at each station!
Food was also a way for us to bond with strangers who were also our co-passengers. It allowed breaking the barriers of not knowing each other, just because someone was a frequent visitor of that station and knew all the good food to eat. A plate of pakoda allowed several conversations, but most importantly sharing that plate helped us try various dishes en route to our destination.
Those are the bygone eras. I recently had the opportunity to travel by train from Visakhapatnam to Delhi. Almost a week before the scheduled date, I scanned through the route my train will be taking.
Being a Rajdhani, not many big cities/ stops were part of my journey, nor were the stops long enough. Therefore, a day before my journey, I sat down with the route chart and the duration of stoppage to chalk out the plan to eat the snacks at the station. Since only limited stations were there, I had planned to eat the vada pao at Nagpur, because the arrival was exactly at the lunch hour, and I would prefer eating something local and different instead of the regular train food. The next stop after Nagpur was Bhopal, and I was excited to try the chaat for dinner.
My romance with food was very short-lived. Around 2 PM, we arrived at Nagpur, and I rushed down through the platform, utilizing my 10 minutes of stop to find either a dabeli or vada pao to satiate my hunger pang. The disappointment soon sunk in when I did not find a single vendor to indulge my cravings. This is when I realized that platforms have been privatized, and IRCTC has already launched its IPOs.
This meant the food has been privatized. This is when I started looking at the e-catering website (an online platform that allows you to pre-order meals to be delivered to your seat on the train), in hopes something of the local cuisines must have been incorporated. The disappointment grew further when all I could find were Haldirams and Dominos on the menu. The food across the journey was the same and standardized. That is when I decided to write this obituary to train journeys as I remember.
With apparent privatization of platforms, my love for food has also taken a different. With disappointments come new opportunities. Therefore, even though I may never be able to indulge in the local snacks on the platforms, I take it as an opportunity to now visit each city to keep my love for different meals alive. Till then, I still have the old sounds in my head with the tea vendor rhythmically banging on his tiny tea cups and calling out for the chai…