By Tanushree Vyas
“Next station is Rajiv Chowk. Doors will open on the left. Please mind the gap.”
As the train gradually comes to a halt, a sea of people can be seen from the glass windows, waiting to rush inside any coach where they can find a place- a room of their own. This is the situation at the interchange station which is always brimming with capacity during peak hours. Lakhs of commuters switch trains through this interchange station, thereby making it the biggest and the most important of all the stations.
Among the busy people rushing past each other to catch the train, you can find bemused people, confused and amazed by the many stairways and walkways at the station, seeking help. “Will this go to Chandni Chowk?” They are the ones who probably seemed to have boarded the city’s hallmark transport system and look for a heart for a reply in ‘Dilwaalon Ki Dilli.’
Well, I like observing people. (quite evident from what i wrote above) It gives you the ability to read faces and also sometimes understand the much complex realm of thoughts that hovers in one’s mind.
And while you are in the Metro or at the station waiting for it, you get to see (and observe) a lot many things. A group of young girls, all decked up, waiting for the Connaught Place Metro, looking forward to the pleasures in shopping; students frantically revising their notes, bracing up themselves for that 3 hour ordeal; a young couple peacefully enjoying their Nirulas cone, celebrating the spirit called ‘love’; a middle-aged man, desperately waiting for the Metro, in fear of being admonished by his boss, for not being punctual.
Different people with their different stories. And how you come to perceive each of these stories, gives you a new outlook on life.
Thus said, it wouldn’t be wrong to conclude that every Delhiite’s life seems to revolve around the Metro, in some way or the other. For them, to talk of Delhi without the Delhi Metro is perhaps akin to think of Mumbai without its local trains.
