Today we are travelling south to Mysore on Indian Railway’s
‘Shatabdi Express’, which should have
left Madras (Chennai) at 6am this morning, about 500 km away.
We are in good time for the train’s arrival at 11am and as
our taxi pulls into Bangalore City Junction, orange coated porters appear and hoist our
suitcases onto their heads for the walk to platform 7. The station is a hubbub of activity with
hundreds of people arriving, departing, asleep on benches, queuing for the
restrooms and milling around the refreshment booths. Everything seems well organized, the train
announcements are in English and the signs look like the London Underground.
We are told that these long distance services can run late,
but today it's on time and we board our First Class coach to find comfortable reclining seats with
foot rests, decorative window shades and air conditioning. As the train slowly
pulls out of Bangalore, we are presented with chilled bottled water and options
for an airline style lunch to be served later on.
Indian trains are heavily subsidized and our tickets for the
2-Hr. journey cost the equivalent of just 6 GBP ( 9 USD).
We settle back watching the landscape change from city
to horticultural countryside. Our new
friend in the next seat says that we’ll find all the market garden crops
as well as pineapples, sweet corn, rice, herbs/spices, nuts….just about anything
we can think of !
He explains that we will see few tractors or farm machinery as India has no shortage of labour to work the fields assisted by oxen and donkeys. Machines put people out-of-work 
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| These are not all ours! |
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| Looks familiar........ |
