Rahul and I have had a subliminal sharing experience. After I read about his trip by train I was so moved by guilt at travelling only by air that I promptly took a Business Class Air India flight to India (which is about a level less than a cattle car seat on a low budget airline) and then dropped my pretentious lifestyle by booking a train ticket to Dehra Dun.

I called Rail Bhavan but the Minister was busy (his PA to the PS to the OSD told me that) and so no delegation of high officials was able to coincidentally fetch up at the station to flag me off. Unfortunately, my message did not get through and there was some glitch (Jayanti Natrajan must have stopped it) but the sweeper brigade from the Municipality did not make it to give the platform a springcleaning and so I entered the Shatabdi after trekking several hundred yards of dirty concrete.

Expecting to see the security dispatch from the Home Ministry (which I had requisitioned) I was a trifle disappointed. Worse, no policemen pushed common unwashed folks aside for me to blaze a trail to my seat. I wonder if Rahul had to gallop past the throng from bogey to bogey to find his name on the flapping half -torn chart.

Twenty minutes of Treasure hunt went by before I discovered my seat and instead of six Black Cats my travelling companions were a lady with a baby, another lady with a child of six who was practising his debut on sa re ga ma, a man who belched, two paan-chewing lalaji types and a man on a mobile phone telling his staff how to run the office while he was away except he wasn’t away.

Reflecting casually whether Rahul and I had the same experience I realized we did. I also had my water from a paper cup.