Travelling on trains is as exciting as it is fraught with peril. The peril of meeting the types of people you would generally avoid on your own free will. When travelling on a train, we must have encountered different kinds of people with varying quirks. Often, those quirks become irksome. But since there are 24 million people using the Indian Railways on a daily basis, the funny, the annoying, and the nice often are in a good mix on trains. Here is a list of co-passengers we all have travelled with at least once on our train journeys:
Spilling all of their most intense conversation out of the phone, these people are mostly unaware of and indifferent to their surroundings. When the loudspeakers talk, you have to listen because they give you no choice, and you end up learning more about their personal life than you bargained for.
Always with open laptops, hiding their faces or with headsets talking about important matters. These people take their work too seriously. After all the lights are shut, you will mostly find them sitting in a halo of light emitting from their computers and slogging off into the night. They are mostly quiet, so they are not the worst type of co-passengers, really.
Often found staring at the pages of a thick paperback, they are the best co-passengers you can find on a train. The bookworms keep to themselves, are quiet and might give you a smile if you ask them about the book they are reading. Just avoid conversation if they don't seem into it. Their reading comes first.
Imagine the rocking movement of the train is lulling you to sleep, and you are just about to transport into your dreamland, and an earth-shattering snore makes you jump out of your skin instead. The snorers could possibly be the second worst of the lot, next only to the crying, cranky child.
Officially the worst ones of the lot. If you have the misfortune of sharing a coach with such a family, be prepared to ruin your peace and quiet. And if it is an overnight journey, God save you! The parents of such kids are of two kinds: Either frazzled and embarrassed, trying their best to pacify the kid, or entirely unbothered, leaving the kids to their own devices.
In the middle of the night, as you are trying to hold on to your flimsy sleep for dear life, comes a usually frail-sounding voice, "Beta aap upar chale jaoge?" (Could you please take the upper berth?) It's a boon and bane for a young person to get a lower berth because you are sure to encounter such people, and most of the time, you cannot refuse since they're older.