Commentary/Dilip D'Souza

How will we turn into a magnet for the world's foremost capitalists if we cannot run our trains on time?

At the railway station, they've hit upon a new wrinkle on the usual way to tell you what's happening with a train you're waiting interminably for. Of course, the old way was to fight your way to the tiny information window. There, you couldn't hear the man's mumbled response above the usual station racket. So then you turned to the board that's reserved for this information. It normally has a terse few lines with names of trains, their scheduled arrival times and the number of hours late they are, numbers that always seem to mutate into bigger numbers as you wait. I do believe there has not been a single day when these boards were empty.

But now there's some mysterious point after which the lines no longer tell you how late the train is. Instead, the man writes on the board: 'Left Kalyan at 2245.' As if to say, it's on its way, therefore it will be here eventually, so please don't bother me with stupid questions any more.

What the railway man hopes you won't remember is that Kalyan is not exactly next door. When I got to the station the other night, the board said the train from Pune I had to meet would be an hour and 40 minutes late. This, on a three-and-a-half hour run. Then the sign on the board changed to: 'Left Kalyan at 2245.' Now Kalyan is a full hour away.

If the train had already lost an hour and 40 minutes in getting to Kalyan, what would it do between Kalyan and Dadar? Sure enough, it lost another half an hour and finally rolled in well past midnight. Two hours and ten minutes late. Only once in all that time was I sure of when it was going to arrive: when I saw the lights on its engine, just outside the station.

Meanwhile, the sign remained teasingly on the board long after the train had moved on from Dadar: 'Left Kalyan at 2245.'

Now think about it: why didn't the man simply write 'Left Pune at 1830' on the board, close up his window and go home? That's about as useful to know as the time the train left Kalyan. What's more, he wouldn't have had to wait over four hours to write it, either. How much simpler this would have been! No doubt, now that I've done the hard work of dreaming it up, the railways will quickly put this efficient innovation into practice.

Of course, I spent those two hours and ten minutes hanging around at Dadar. That's because even though I tried all evening, I could not get through to any of the railway inquiry phone numbers. Correction: I did get through to one of them, an automated service that asked me to punch in the number of the train I was interested in. I had no idea, so I waited, hoping a human being -- I think the railways still employs some of those -- would answer. All I got was a polite 'The number you have pressed' -- I had not -- 'does not exist. Thank you for using this service.' So I had no choice but to make my way to the station, hoping the train would be on time.

And since it wasn't, I had lots of time to ruminate about the utter idiocy of the entire episode, among other things. Besides various very nasty thoughts directed at the railways that I will desist from reproducing here.

Here in Bombay, we are very excited that it is 1997. We're waiting keenly for the middle of the year. Not, as you might imagine, for August 15, when independent India turns 50 years old. That's not of much interest to anyone. No, we've focused a month or so earlier, on the day when Hong Kong returns to China's fold. There's a popular perception here, right or wrong, that that will signal the end of Hong Kong's position as a global financial hub.

And who will step into those giant shoes? That's right: Bombay. I am quite certain that not one day has gone by in 1997 without someone or the other in our political firmament muttering fond hopes about how Bombay is going to turn into the next financial capital of Asia, the world's new Hong Kong. It's enough to get a mere columnist positively shaking in his boots with excitement.

Then there's an experience on a train station. Reality hits with a thud and a whole host of questions start asking themselves. Try them the next time you have two hours to kill waiting for a train.

How will we turn into a magnet for the world's foremost capitalists if we cannot run our trains on time? Or if we cannot ensure that as simple a thing as inquiring about the trains on the phone works reliably? Or if even that's not possible, at least that reasonable information about them is available at stations?

There's a seductive glamour to that vision of Bombay-as-Hong-Kong: shimmering glass towers, glitzy malls, planes landing and taking off by the minute, people whispering high finance into their Nokia mobile phones. But who's going to take care of the not-so-glamorous details? Like running the railways efficiently?

Don't get me wrong -- I fully believe that Indians have the skills and the drive to take Bombay to the place in the world that Hong Kong occupies today. A vibrant stock-market, a spirit of entrepreneurship, proven skills in industry: these are only some of our strengths.

But they are more than compensated for by corruption and inefficiency from those who rule us. Standing there at Dadar station, I asked myself: why should I believe a government that tries to sell me stories of a new Hong Kong when it cannot assure me that a three-and-a-half hour train journey will not take five-and-a-half hours? When it forces me and hundreds of others to spend those extra two hours twiddling our big toes at the station, ignorant of when the train will actually arrive until we actually see it pulling in? When, come to think of it, it will not even give us chairs to sit in while we wait? So I'm thinking, why not simply change the name of Mumbai yet again? Why not call our city 'New Hong Kong'? What better way to ensure that when Hong Kong vanishes into the Chinese maw, a New Hong Kong will be right here where Mumbai is today?

Hmm. 'Left New Hong Kong at 0730'. Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

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