The Deprived Tier
About 1,700 passengers can travel on a fully booked train and there are approximately 13,000 such vehicles chugging along on Indian tracks. In 2012–13, passengers amounting to 4.781 billion (including a rough 20% estimate of people who travel without a ticket) embarked upon a journey using non-suburban trains. This means 13.1 million individuals are pulled cross-country by our locomotives daily, or 1.1% of the population!
Everyone loves sitting next to a window. Rich, poor, gay, straight, old, young, male, female, transgender, Dalit, Brahmin, tribal, urban, Rajasthani, Telugu, pilgrim or addict. Isn’t that the whole fun of it, to see the hinterlands rolling past, while ruminating about the cosmos and everything in it, perhaps with the earphones on? This happens to be a somewhat important topic for me because some girl that I used to know once wrote a little poem about the horizons that she witnessed. Reading those now-silly rhymes as a geeky teenager slowly led me to start being a more creative person in life who usually prefers to just capture some photographs in similar situations.
But yes, back to the topic. Countless kids have cried and disturbed the peace just to sit or sleep next to a window. We scarcely even think of these negative spaces (uhm) present on vertical surfaces — but they still thanklessly save us all from being forced to awkwardly avoid staring at unknown co-passengers while they ogle back — without being disrespectful about it. And oh yes, they help you easily throw garbage (not recommended), buy stuff from hawkers or even spit out chewing gum or gutkha.
So please tell me — why doesn’t our railway system (or that of Pakistan or any other country which shares similar stories) introduce them on the upper and middle berths?! Some people even decline swapping their window seats for grannies with rheumatism politely requesting them to do so. Eight fit in a compartment and currently only four can properly look outside. Three in sleeping hours. This basic luxury is always being denied to half of them.
Hell, such a small change applied at a large scale would greatly help reduce the passengers on the bottom-most level, because now people have an extra reason to stay above. Walking even in the fancier air-conditioned bogeys is a hassle or an inconvenience at best. At its worst, somebody’s private parts get bumped and rubbed against another person. This may additionally result in great cost-savings in terms of manufacturing the coaches. Forgot to mention, increased natural lighting and ventilation. The latter vitally important to cool down sizzling non-airconditioned bogeys and to dissipate fart, sweat and food smells swirling in them. Save electricity consumed by those useless fans.
By the way, while we are at it? Let us introduce retractable ramps at the doors for the wheelchaired as well — I assume having a porter lift a cripple up is not the most dignified way to depart somewhere. Alas, the discourse is centered more around bullet trains and Hyperloops today instead. Can we please find ways to upgrade the existing infrastructure? One big project here or there is not going to alter any ground realities. We certainly don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater..
..am afraid in all likelihood this will just remain some letters on an unknown corner of the infinitely-nodal world wide web. User experience design needs to be so much more than mere boxes and labels on a screen, you know. Well, at least in this part of the world. Are you a professional? Fuck wireframes.
