A Train Ride to Salvation

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Kolkata, India(GaeaTimes.com) — The life of a daily passenger in the North Sealdah main-line is generally very mundane. The local train stops in the station, people get down and then there is a wide spread scramble to get into the train. One may find it to be very odd that these people who are pushing and shoving you to get inside will talk very politely to you once you are out of the railway station. Even more they are really respectable people with respectable lives. I wonder sometimes that how do all these people lead a dual existence like this. I am glad to say that I had a very rewarding experience with the passengers of a local train I once had the fortune of boarding.

It all started the same usual way last Thursday on the 29th of July. I got aboard a Barrackpore Local on the way to my office. Once I got into the train I breathed a sigh of relief. Another battle was won, I was in the train and will reach my office on time. The images inside the train were broadly the same I am used to. Then suddenly out of nowhere I could hear a very recognizable tune. It was a very old Kirtan ( a song sung out of love for Lord Krishna). I found out to my amazement that a group of office goers and general passengers were singing the kirtan in chorus. This is when I decided that this was to be my story. I contacted one of the members of the group, Babu Mondal about my intentions and he was more than happy to cooperate with me. I took his number and called him after getting back home. In a very short interview over the phone I got to know about the ground details of their initiative.

The idea of such an initiative came from Sri Proloy Goswami, who works for a transport company. One fine day almost 24 years ago he started singing in the compartment. The other passengers started to join him and the corner stone for the group called Chalantika was laid. Over the years this group gathered momentum and currently more than 250 people are the members of this group. Sri Proloy Goswami is an acclaimed singer and also won the ‘Uttam Kumar Award‘ for the Bengali film ‘Purashkar’. With the course of time people from varied walks of life also joined in. One such member is Mr S.K Saha, a section engineer for the Indian Railways. He is the secretary of this organization. According to him, throughout these long years not even a single passenger in the train has complained about getting disturbed. Ratan das, a businessman by profession also added that whenever a non-member of the organization boards the train they try to get him a seat. Another founding member Mr Sujit Kumar Bhattacharya, who works for the IACS said that they also contribute to relief funds on a regular basis to help and make this society a better place. They also assured me that they take care of the fact that women and children are not harassed in the compartment. More over they don’t allow smoking and drinking in the compartment as well.

One of the songs Ananta Pal sang in that journey was “Tumi jano na re priyo tumi mor jiboner sadhona” (You don’t know my love, that you are the prayer of my life), a Biroher gan (song of pathos), written by Bijoy Sarkar. If you listen to the song carefully you will see that the song is in the voice of Radha. It describes the pain she has to go through once Lord Krishna left her. The song has very deep undertones and I will urge all the readers to listen to it. Proloy Goswami also talks about the philosophy of life in regard to the Bhakti cult. To understand his teachings we have to make another journey to the teachings of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and his visions about prayers. I will talk about it in another article.

After we got off at the Sealdah station, Ratan Das talked with me about the present state of decadence we find our selves in. His philosophy was strongly in resonance with the concept, that we are 5000 in Kalyug and things will get worse before anything good happens. But I felt that when people like these come forward to help make this world a better place to live, we will always have hope. So the next time you travel in the Barrackpore Local in the morning you may just get to see them and the wonderful work they are doing.