The Mumbai Local Journey

This is a nightmare for any sane person living on planet Earth.

You sleep at midnight every day, or even later, set up an early morning alarm to get up, at around 5:50AM in the morning, complete all your routine activities as quickly as possible and run.

You run for the train.

Once you reach the platform, you try your best to board the train, but be careful, there's almost always a huge gap in between the platform level and the floor of the train, if you fall in there, consider yourself dead.
Oh, not just that, you need to get across another force, that is, other people. Other people like you who ran for the train from their homes waking up early in the morning just like you. You got to push them, push them like you are in a battlefield, ready to attack an upcoming enemy, use all your energy and push to get inside the metal container.

Congratulations, consider yourself lucky to have boarded the train, now you try your best to be yourself, surrounded by tons of people, packed in a metal container worse than farmed bovine animals. You look around at other people just like you, who are standing there, nose to nose with you. But now, what do you do next? What do you do until you reach your destination, for probably another hour or two? With no space left to even move your hand around, with hot and humid air, breathing in the air exhaled by hundreds of other passengers, with little or no air ventilation, what do you do?

You either stay calm, close your eyes and sleep, get your mobile phone out of your pocket and stare at it, that is, if you are able to reach your pocket to get it out.

Now you need to be careful not to stand at the wrong place. Because if you do, you will be pushed out at a wrong station by people standing behind you, ready to dive out as soon as the train has almost stopped. Or you will get hit by people standing ready on the platform to jump inside the moving train as it is about to stop at the station. More dangerous than standing in for a bull stampede.

And, are people sober and mindful enough to stay calm the entire journey? Are they really so at peace or have already accepted their fate that they would travel without even uttering a single word or not getting into any fights? Well, of course not, you will also come across people fighting, arguing, hitting each other over minuscule matters and serious matters as well. Going to such an extent so as to throw the opponent out of the running train, killing him or her.

You stand there listening to the automatic prior announcements of upcoming station and prepare a virtual progress bar of how far you have reached and how much more is left. You get excited as your destination comes close, ready to get down.

Now you got to get down, which requires you to prepare yourself and stand at the correct position, so that when other passengers forcefully push outside, you are in their stream. Now you breath deeply, self assuring that you reach your destination safely. But wait is the run over? Maybe you will still have to run to your office or college.

Oh, and you got to repeat the entire thing for returning back home, best of luck for that.
In all, you have wasted approximately 3 to 4 hours of your day running, getting stuck with other people, trying to be safe and running more.

I suspect living in a calm village and farming would be better than this.
And congratulate yourself once again for not being part of a dozen people getting killed by these trains every day.
Now get ready to finish up whatever you have to do at home and sleep at midnight again, to do the same thing tomorrow.

This is inhumane, all these humans deserve so much more comfort, safety, peace and freedom.