AS all around our nation I hear the bluster, see the sneers and feel the heat of danger I borrow from my book, ‘DARE’ the lines on the steam engines of our childhood! In my mind, even today, there is no ferocious, powerful, robust, beast, like the steam engine of yesterday. Even now whenever I want to imagine something more terrible than a dragon, a monster belching smoke, a machine of pure energy, I picture the steam engine.
I still remember the walk to the railway line when I was a child: It took place when my dad came home a little early, which meant the whole family was going for a stroll. A stroll meant a walk, and a brisk one it was in the sometimes biting cold to the railway track. Now this was no ordinary line. It lay wedged between two rising hills, and in the centre of both these small hills, ran the railway.
We walked, my brother and I with stilled excitement, sometimes glancing at each other, grinning because we knew what we were going to experience, and of course on the way, my dad would stop at the vada woman’s hut, where my mother would ask if the vadas were hot, she always said they were, and loaded with those steaming morsels we continued our journey to the railway line.
It was a vantage spot we sat on; on one of the little hills, where there was a bend. Here we could hear the steam engine but not see it till it took the turn. We sat, in anticipation. The signal went down, and we heard it, far away, the build up of sound, no whistle was needed, no horn sounded, animals and all moved out with the feeling of its presence, and then as we watched half in awe, half in terror, the furious monster took the bend, and in a synchronized movement of steel and wheels, and smoke and steam, it charged, literally lunged up the line: Oh what a magnificent spectacle, especially afterwards as we ate those vadas in silence imbibing the feeling of majestic power.
But today that steam engine is no more. The ones that cruise at speeds five times that of the steam monster run silently. Power is noiseless and quiet. No bluster, no build up of tension. Is there a lesson for us? That all the sound and commotion made by some political leaders are but a cacophony of noise? That finally, it’s the silent, sure and swift, that become the strong!
I remember the steam engine, but there’s a smile which has replaced the fright and awe, a smile that knows all that threatening sound, was finally beaten by stillness and sureness! Today, those steam engines line our museums, especially a railway museum in Delhi, which I am sure will soon have human ones soon..!
