It’s our country – Let’s keep it clean
View(s):A thrice-blesséd new year, folks! Trust that the turning of the calendar will bring you and your loved ones joy, love, peace, grace, and justice! Every blessing to all Sri Lankans, abroad and at home…
It is nice to start a new year on a clean and clement note. Ergo, the greetings above! But often, one needs to be intentional about brushing those cobwebs away. So while the lady of the hearth-side bustled about dusting and sweeping those musty corners, yours truly donned a summer bonnet and stepped out into the sunshine for a day riding the rails.
This country’s railways are (quite literally) a breath of fresh air for me. Not as noisy as the highways of city and town life, nor as grimy as suburban streets. No one is in a rush to get anywhere, because more often than not the journey is the destination. (Except during “office hours”, when the mask drops and normally polite people wouldn’t think twice about stepping on your toes to get the window seat for their long haul home…)
“A Class M4 MLW Alco MX620 Bombardier No. 743 (‘Madhu’) at Maho...”
The point is that trains are therapeutic in relieving the existential angst of the long-distance traveller. Or simply put, it’s a panacea for anyone who’s in it for life… which is just about everyone, dears! You ought to try it sometime. Just leave that chariot or velocipede in the garage and buy at least a platform ticket at your nearest railway station. (Worst thing that could happen is the milk train could be late…)
I entrained at my local (“Down around the corner, Half a mile from here”… now how did the Doobie Brothers know?). The sleepy five-bogey Class S8 Diesel Multiple Unit (‘power set’ to the plebs) got me to Colombo Fort – or FOT, in railway terminology – efficiently enough, if a tad colourlessly. No fan of cold and clinical DMUs, I was soon happy to be in the company of the older diesel-hydraulics and diesel-electrics – although, with the advent of the ubiquitous Diesel Electric Multiple Units from China, the more glamorous old girls are going the way of all engines … that is to say, to the railway graveyard. Sob! Sigh…
No, dears, don’t stop reading! This is not a self-indulgent ramble about a hobby-horse. Much as I would like to rant about how poorly some old Class W1s are doing these days and rave about the yeoman service rendered by the CGR/SLGR workhorse M2s, this piece is not about that pastime. While I was travelling for leisure, there came upon your wandering scribe another glamour (old English for “spell”): the cleanliness of provincial railway stations in general and one major railroad junction in particular.
Maho Junction Railway Station, I sing your praises! You are clean and hygienic. There is every facility to alleviate the loneliness of the journey-weary traveller. Adequate food. Ample water on tap at several points. Rest-rooms in working and sanitary condition. Benches on both platforms of the centre isle. Bins to ditch travel-detritus. Customary notices about this being “your” railway station and sundry encouragements to “keep this station clean”. Not a cigarette butt, toffee wrapper, siri-siri bag or trashed newspaper page in sight. Smiling staff. Shade. And a panoply of trains. (Including, for the aficionado, a semi-restored Class M1 locomotive, No. 560, the last of the Brush-Bagnalls from a bygone era.)
There, I’ve had some fun and said my piece – in one go. Fun: the romance of the railway – that great national treasure, relict of our colonial era, an inheritance that we natives would do well to guard and deploy better for the sake of posterity as well as prosperity. Piece: the part about cleanliness. Good if the country at large could take an example from Maho Junction Railway Station.
Of course, there are pi-dogs on the platform and station staff chat idly with passers-by. On the national stage too, political curs yap at passing caravans and socio-economic development lacks integrity if not indolence. But if a once dirty dusty down-in-the-mouth dump of a rural railway station can come clean – and stay clean, despite a plethora of trains and passengers passing through weekly, daily, hourly – why not the country?
Naturally, we will all need a change of mindset. Our garbage is everybody’s ruin and therefore a national business. We need to learn to be willing – and able – to pick up our litter after ourselves. Take out the trash. Empty the cans. Sweep out the corners. Tidy the mess. You get the picture?
My work-study-room balcony where mosquitoes may breed in carelessly strewn tins and cans might be a good starting place. Your backyard can follow. Who knows where we can look next to cleanse the Augean stables? Organised crime and endemic corruption can be our common target. Here’s to good training and trashing in 2013…
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