Saturday, May 29, 2021

BookMarks #83: The Great Train Journey

Title: The Great Train Journey 
Author: Ruskin Bond 
Genre: Fiction, Short Stories, Anthology 
Published: 2018 

BookMarks 
After the heavy duty Paradoxical PM and the prevailing covid news all around, it was time to try to relax. And that’s how once again I found myself in the familiar world of Ruskin Bond’s writings. 

The Great Train Journey is a collection of 14 short stories entwined by the Indian Railways encompassing the trains, tracks, stations, and the journeys. In this short story collection, read a a few new ones and got reacquainted with some old ones. And there were repetitions with the stories themselves. 

I think there are at least three where the key plot is driving the leopard out of the tunnel before the dragon like train moves along. And I found Deoli and Shamli to be identical stations – having a station master’s office, a waiting room, a tea stall and few dogs, where the trains stopped for ten minuted but no one ever got on or off. Of course there is one key difference – the author never gets off at Deoli but in Shamli he does! 

It is this familiarity which I guess keeps bringing me back to the works of Mr. Bond! And as he has quoted in the Introduction, these stories also bring back the times “When life was not so full of care and there was time to stand and stare” 

Previously on BookMarks The Paradoxical Prime Minister 
Others works by Ruskin Bond on BookMarks 

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