Rail gaadi. That’s how they’d sound once upon a time. Nowadays they’re more like the flypast of a robust mosquito or two past your earlobes: Hammmmmmmmzzz! Coming, coming, and gone. Bullet Train, so called because it resembles the velocity of a bullet. No shame in saying we don’t have one, having been promised for the longest time this past decade that we are about to get one. We may yet be about to get one.

No shame in a whole lot of things. No shame in saying and doing things that used to be patently shameful things. No shame in putting down, rubbishing and ramming fellow human beings. No shame in knocking who or what they believe in. No shame in celebrating the killer of the Father of this nation.

No shame in tearing into the most sacred book of our collective, the Constitution, and wishing it junked. No shame in proclaiming we are actually not a collective, we do not wish to be and so off you go, you AllThings WrongPeople to anyplace but not here. No shame in saying what you did was actually my doing and so let me rub your name off and emboss mine on it. No shame in undoing what you did and saying such undoing is the stuff we need. No shame in saying the present and the future can wait, what we need on priority is to change the past. No shame in picking at past things and making them present things and claiming, incredulously and astonishingly, that they are present things, ForTheFirstTime things. There has, after all, been no shame in saying for quite some time that before the nation received the gift of IHappened, NothingHappened. Shame is not in vogue, shameless and shameful and stuff thereabouts is more like it, more the in thing. No shame in having such rumbustious song and dance over a rail gaadi you’d think we got one for the first time in our lives. Not got, sorry, sorry, given. We are given, we should be happy with what we are given. No shame in being like that.

And no shame in being like rail gaadi mantri who behaved as if we were in the mid-nineteenth century and he was the one taking us out on our first rail gaadi ride.

Chhuk Chhuk, Chhuk Chhuk, ChhukChhuk, Chhuk,

Rail Gaadi, Oe Rail Gaadi,

Rail Gaadi, Rail Gaadi,

Chhuk Chhuk, Chhuk Chhuk, Chhuk Chhuk, Chhuk Chhuk,

Beech Waale Station Bolen, Ruk Ruk,Ruk Ruk,

Tadak Bharak, Lohe Ki Sadak,

Tadak Bharak, Lohe Ki Sadak,

Yahan Se Wahan, Wahan Se Yahan,

Yahan Se Wahan, Wahan Se Yahan,

Chhuk Chhuk, Chhuk Chhuk,Chhuk Chhuk, Chhuk Chhuk,

Copied, but no shame,

From Harindranath Chattopadhyay

But no shame and stick no blame

And stop doing this hai-hai-hai-hai.