Phooo! Phuuuh! Mic testing. Attention passengers (if there are any still around for there may be no place for them to be): the platform you are standing on is no longer a platform. It has been rolled up in the national interest and been donated to the Fund of all national interest. So those of you who are still there we don’t know where you stand but if you can still hear, this announcement is for you: you stand nowhere because there is no platform for you to stand on.

We may have changed the platform, like would often happen in the years that can, alas, no longer be retrieved from the past. They now call them the years when NothingHappened but this did happen often: platforms of arriving trains were changed, and departing trains departed from those changed platforms.

But what would be the point now? You must understand this before we can move ahead from here. There are no trains anymore. They’ve all been submitted to the purposes of national interest, whatever that constitutes, and the proceeds of whatever came off them as a result of them being submitted have become part of the Fund. That Fund which is above and beyond question. We had trains. We had the most trains. Probably because we had the most people, or nearly the most, and we had the most tracks and those tracks had the most cross-crossed distances. You may find the numbers for all of those things in some book of records or another.

If you don’t find them in any book or records, all of those books of so-called records you are free to call anti-national. Further, you can take them to the nearest post office, have them stamped or franked and dispatched to Bakistan. I don’t care what address in Bakistan. That done, we can call of this — the disappeared trains and the collapsed platforms and the rolled up tracks — nothing but Bakistani bunkum brobaganda.

But none of the above applies to what follows below: We are getting the Goli Train. This is no goli, which is a popular synonym for jumla. The Goli Train is coming. It is so fast that when it comes — and goes — you may not even be able to see it. But it will be there, it will have come and gone.

We are mulling whether we will require platforms for the Goli Train when it begins to shoot about. It is so fast what would be the point of it stopping. That’s why, we are wrapping up the platforms on which you were meant to have been, awaiting the train that would never come.

They would call it the Rail

Passenger, Express and Mail

And there was always the Snail

Now all of it sounds twisted Tale