On the one hand , it is encouraging to hear the news that the rail link between Bangalore and Mysore will be doubled. Perhaps this will have the effect of easing the traffic movement the two cities in both ways and speed up the travel time, which is to be welcome.

On the other hand, considering the problem of long travel time and stoppages between stations, a double track would indeed provide a partial solution. Partial because the old adage is, more the resources more are the consumers.

I personally would doubt whether I welcome the speed up, purely for my own selfish reasons. As some one living in London, with a very busy schedule all round the year, I travel by fast Eurostar from London to Brussles or Paris very frequently, use the fast French TGV and the new generation German fast trains at least a dozen times a year. Speed to me is to be contextualised. I get the opportunity to visit India and travel to Mysore perhaps twice in a decade. When I arrive at Bangalore station from Europe , I usually take the slowest train and for me more stops on the way scheduled or unscheduled, the better. It gives me plenty of opportunity to savour the sights and sounds of the places that I saw and heard during my childhood and college days in Mysore and I could with leisure travel in and out of memory lanes.

Studying in the then only engineering college in Mysore, a group of us would usually leave for Bangalore twice a year when we got breaks A bunch of our mates from the medical college would also join us, and together we would board the slowest train- usually passenger train from Mysore Station. We did the same for our return journey. The purpose of the onward journey for us was to meet with our friends in the Government Engineering College (Now named after that great engineer Visweswarayya), and for our medical friends the same in the Bangalore Medical College. Meeting our friends in the Government Engineering College and working with them for a few days were extremely beneficial for us as the professors in that college were the ones who set the exam papers (All colleges in my college days located in the Old Mysore Region were part of the Mysore University). But why board the slowest trains? Each of us in the two groups was an ardent follower of the Navya Kavya genre unleashed by that great poet Gopala Krishna Adiga. The slow train journeys in some instances over 5 hours (we did not care, the slower the better!) provided us a wonderful opportunity to discuss Adiga’s poems and in particular the techniques he so impressively employed poem after poem, and comment on the imprint of his genius that each poem carried. We had at times critical inputs from a few other passengers who got into our carriage at Mandya or Maddur. At one time, a scholar who joined our discussion at Mandya, completely forgot his destination and came with us to Bangalore, He was so immersed in providing critical summing up that he forgot to get off when his station, Chennapatna, arrived. We pooled our meagre funds, bought him a nice lunch, and a ticket back to Chennapatna.

Years later, one day while travelling in Chamundi Express from Mysore, I indeed met Prof Adiga. who arrived just when the train was about to depart, entered our carriage and sat opposite to me, and with a smile said that he thought that he was not going to make it. After preliminary introductions and a few minutes of mulling over Mysore politics, I gave him a resume of the above experience. He smiled with modesty, and was very reluctant to add to what I said. Forced by me and other passengers who by this time recognised him, he joined in our discussion. We had a very joyful literary tour de force of Navya Kavya for nearly 3 hours. The train unusually on that day had no unscheduled stoppages and pulled into Bangalore Station on time! We believed that Goddess Chamundi had the last laugh!