The Hindu Business Line : Tolerance and train travel

WE ALL try to be tolerant; or at least, to be seen as tolerant. In reality, it is our streaks of intolerance that gain more prominence, though on most occasions we manage to keep these blips on our personality graph well hidden. Tolerance is easier talked about than practised, especially so when it comes to instances of mass interaction.

These days, it is quite difficult to find a commune of tolerant people, except perhaps during mass prayer congregations. Then too, it would be of the passive kind, with tolerance remaining safely imprisoned in the mind. Rarely does one actually witness tolerance of an active and tangible variety, that too with mass participation.

But there is one place where you find millions of tolerant people day in and day out. They, quite religiously, leave behind their baggage of intolerance the moment they get together. And the gathering boasts of nothing religious about it.

Come rush hour and you find this rare species without fail in the suburban trains of Mumbai.

According to an estimate, some six million commuters use this mode of transport every day. They travel along three routes — the western, central and harbour lines. And they are spread over some 2,000 services with the trains on an average carrying approximately three times their normal load of about 1,760.

In real terms, it is difficult to quantify suburban train travel in Mumbai with anything as mundane as averages. Thus, it could be a four-fold load during peak hours and it gets worse during the monsoon months, with trains running late.

Though one cannot strictly call it camaraderie, rarely does one get to see any fights in these overcrowded trains. You get handled like a sack of potatoes — pushed this side and that, stepped on, shoved aside unceremoniously at stations by the avalanche of people alighting, or getting in. Yet, instances of harsh words getting exchanged are not all that frequent.

And there is hardly any difference between the way people behave in the first- and second-class rakes in terms of the equanimity they show in the face of severe provocation. Cold water is doused over the once-in-a-blue-moon heated exchanges. And in case the tiff persists, both are told to shut up or get out.

Sure, the whooping and banshee cries that take you back to college days are not as regular in first class bogies. In the second class, it is more like a picnic and even the most inhibited souls soon leave behind their sang-froid.

If anything teaches you to be tolerant about your fellow citizens, travelling in a Mumbai suburban surely does. Civility does get tested at times, but there is no `eye for an eye' kind of retributive justice — either sought or given. Thus, you do not start wearing soiled clothes because the man nearby does; nor do you decide against having a bath next day to get even.

One learns to be tolerant also from the perspective of health. It could be presumed that normal, healthy people face the danger of falling sick after such travel. That the crowded bogies can prove to be fertile breeding grounds for all kinds of viruses and bacteria. Which means there should be a lot of sick people in this city at any given point of time. Till now, no one has been made privy to any statistics to prove such a presumption.

On the contrary, regular commuters point out that their daily grind often has a therapeutic value. "You discipline the mind against pain and anger. You learn to conquer what would otherwise have been major irritants in regular walks of life, such as physical discomfiture or mental agony. It is almost like going for yoga," says a Borivili-Churchgate regular, in a saintly tone.

One can argue that the suburban train travel experience is anything but `other-worldly'. But the sum total of many parts of this experience lends a certain calm to your demeanour, though not to your dress, which often gets ravaged. Some believe the answer to this one problem lies in wrinkle-free dresses. But, then, they are yet to make dress material that is both crease-friendly and grease-resistant. The closest one got to this unbeatable combination was when the late Dhirubhai Ambani came up with his polyester revolution. However, polyester is not a preferred dress material any longer.

On the positive side, there are many advantages in practising tolerance during rush hour. To name a few, you get to learn the nuances of stock market trading, learn an assortment of bhajans and become a confidante to intimate details pertaining to at least a couple of people around you.

Those who are die-hard revisionists try to play up the negatives, saying that those who even suffer from a whiff of claustrophobia are well advised to stay away. Those are the unenlightened ones. Just like the Gowd brothers of Hyderabad who cure asthma by making patients swallow fish, a regular diet of rush hour train travel in Mumbai may cure forever those plagued by claustrophobia.

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