July 22, 2007	Sunday	Rajab 06, 1428

LONDON: There used to be poetry on the railways. Ask Hardy or Wordsworth, Auden or Betjeman. Actually, don’t, they’re dead. But that’s my point: the poetry has gone from the tracks. I guess it’s because Arriva Trains Wales, Virgin and First Capital Connect don’t lend themselves to verse. And Ashford International is no Adlestrop. There is a place where lyricism is alive on the lines though — India, as beautifully shown in Bombay Railway (BBC4).

We meet Prakash Rahule, for example, magistrate at the railway court in Mumbai and responsible for passing sentence on hundreds of hawkers every day. But Rahule is also a published poet, and he’s written a sympathetic poem from the hawker’s point of view, which appears to take issue with his own role as magistrate.

In India, the railways are more than just railways, they’re the lifeline of the nation, and nowhere more so than in Mumbai, India’s heart. Six and a half million commuters use the city’s suburban rail network every day, up to 5,000 on every train. Hawkers and runaway children live on the railway, and it has a special police force. Every line is clad in its own slum community. And each day 10 people are killed by trains — some because they wanted to be, unable to keep up with the city’s life-race, but most because they just didn’t hear the train coming above the Mumbai din.

That’s not a transport system, that’s a world. No wonder it gets spoken about so lyrically. And it’s not only words, the pictures are pretty good too. A man winds up the huge Victorian clock in the tower of the beautiful Chaturvedi Shivaji terminus. Then, when his work is done, he takes a break, opens a small window to the world outside, a small human face within a huge clockface, and looks down at the heaving city below.

There’s a flash of colour, the saris of the women cooling off in the open doorway of a ladies-only carriage, billowing in the breeze, like an exotic tropical bird flying past. The whole thing has a rhythm — of steel wheels on steel points, the whistle of the trains, the hawkers’ cries, a rhythm of life. A really lovely film. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service