Hope!!!

“We wouldn’t make it I fear”, muttered Hemant who was in the cab along with me and a fellow intern, Sahil at Kota from our institute IIT Bombay. It’s probably the most terrible traffic jam, one could find in his life in Mumbai. We started an hour and a half ago and had to crawl through the roads from my institute to Borivali station. We could make only to the half in the first hour and were left with another dozen of kilometers to cover amidst the heavy traffic. Dad started calling and I was clueless of what to speak out as this had never happened before to any of us to have missed a train; it was a good experience though chasing all the way through the incoming buzz of passengers in the station carrying heavy suitcases and a backpack carrying the most precious possession of a college student – LAPTOP. I kept my fingers crossed all through the journey. I started counting 120 secs reverse while on a halt at the traffic lights in order to compensate for the exponentially increasing heartbeat frequency. Now, we were left with 5 more kilometers to be covered in 7 remaining minutes. I hurriedly made a call to the Indian Railways IVRS and went along with the instructions expecting to get a good news about the train being late. I had no idea as to what response I was about to receive from the machine sitting on the other end of the phone and guess what, “Mumbai se Jaipur jaane wali gadi 10 minute late hai.” We all shouted with glee and the driver gave a cherishing smile which soon got abducted by his high level concentration while driving the car. Mann, I respect the dedication with which he was driving. We soon started retaining our hopes which was almost lost and here we were again, right in the mid of a traffic, this was of a short duration though. I kept my patience and the driver soon drove us to the station. We jumped out of the cab and gunned towards the rear hood of the cab to unbuckle it, took our luggage out and made our way to platform 2, the usual place for our train. I started moving towards the platform and what did I see, the train has already caught up speed. It all came with a strike and there we were again-helpless!!. I looked high up in the sky and suddenly the coach-display LED caught my attention which displayed a different train no. from ours. We hurriedly enquired about the correct platform for our train and learned that it had been diverted to platform four for this day. We once again lifted our suitcases and BOLT!!!… We reached to the skywalk and there it gave us a sigh of relief to find that the train hadn’t yet arrived. We reached the platform, waited for the train, got up and here I am writing this blog.
Sayonara