Tales From The Underground

Any short term visitor to London will go home to their loved ones and marvel on about the tube. They will tell you how efficient it is, how quick it is. Young children would probably put the tube on their list of London Loves alongside Madame Tussaud’s and the Tower of London.

For me the tube is my reading time, I plough through books. It is especially good in the morning, when I get my own seat and read away.

However, reality sets in when one finishes that chapter and does not want to go onto the next, and one takes away their eyes from the book and looks up and around. Your gazing eyes will be met by emotionless faces, faces that don’t smile, faces that stay still and blank, except to grimace and frown of course.

You will get up and offer your seat to a pregnant mom or an aged person who clearly needs the seat, but the rest of the people will look down, they wont give up that seat at any cost.

I have heard stories about the Mumbai train which is apparently one of the 100 things one needs to experience before you leave this planet. Rush hour traffic in Zone 1 of the tube will not come close to the amount of people who occupy a carriage on a train in Mumbai. I have heard that it is sheer hell, however, somehow, there is a communal spirit. People have this attitude that there is always room for one more.

This attitude of concern for the other is a rarity on the tube.

Strangers don’t converse on the tube, if you ask someone about the book they reading or try and engage them in any form of polite discussion, they will sneer and look away and think that you are one of the mentally unstable people who was released by Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister

Most of the time all what one can hear is the thumping sounds of an iPod which is surely deafening the person with the earphones and causing irreparable hearing damage to those in a 1 metre radius.

The worst is the trip home, you have had a long day at work you board the tube and you are packed into the carriage like a sardine, and this gangly person’s arm hovers around your leg, and this person who has not brushed their teeth for 4 days breathes heavily next to you and this punk is listening to some hard core death metal hate-rock. I always thought death metal lyrics were impossible to understand, due to the loudness of their iPod, one can definitely understand every word and actually decipher what they are singing about.

I don’t know what it is, but as soon as one goes underground one retracts into this soulless ghoul who has no concern about anyone else…

I have to go catch my tube…..