30th November – A day of shame, the Queen burnt, a community shamed.

We reached India past mid-night and got to Thane and slept around 4:00am, anticipating a birthday feast the next morning courtesy of my In-laws. When I awoke at 9:00 am, the city was silent, not a soul moved anywhere. This is a very strange occurrence in any part of India let alone a suburb like Thane. My dad informed me that riots had broken out in the city and hence everything was shut down. I thought it was a joke but if only that were true, the next 24 hours I felt nothing but anger and shame at my fellow Indians.
A couple of days before, a statue of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar had been desecrated by some ruffians in a far away city of Kanpur in the state of Uttar Pradesh. This is no doubt a dirty offense. The culprits should be apprehended and punished accordingly. Dr. Ambedkar was an intelligent man who authored our constitution and championed the cause of the downtrodden. The concept of statues and their representation of living beings is something I haven’t been able to understand in India. In retaliation of this act in a faraway state, the dalits in Mumbai and its suburbs rioted. Gone were the teachings of Gandhi and Dr. Ambedkar himself. No peaceful protests, no apologies were asked for. Busses and cabs were set ablaze, people pelted shops with stones, the cops fought back with lathis and tear gas. In all this, the new 24 hr news channels in India kept showing images of the descecrated statue and the riots and how people were getting lathi charged by the police. Soon a new and gruesome image flashed on the screen. This was an image of train being burnt. The flames were shooting high in the air and upto 7 bogies were ablaze. When the train was identified as the Deccan Queen, my heart broke.
Deccan Queen has been the one train that has fascinated me since I was a kid. It runs from Pune to Mumbai C.S.T. Leaves at 7:05 in the morning from Pune and returns at 9:15 in the night. She was always the crown of the central railway. She was the first fast train from Pune to Mumbai. She was the first train to be colored blue and white. She would not stop at big stations like Kalyan and Thane and would roar through those like a beast possessed. I would wander to the platform that she would whiz past just to watch the blur of blue and white. People would say she swept the platforms with the dust she would kick-up. Along the years, more trains were introduced, the queen slowed down a bit, she shared colors with other trains originating out of Pune. But I would proudly recall the Queen as the best train I had ever known in my life.
This same Queen was emptied by miscreants near a suburb of Ulhasnagar and set ablaze. She burnt all day, the firemen we helpless to stop the blaze. In the end, the engine was badly destroyed and 7 bogies were burnt to dust. Total monetary loss ran to Rs. 7 crore. She was shut down. For the next 3 days, Puneites who regulary rode their Queen to work, went to the station in the morning, but she did not come. The railway authorities did not have replacement bogies to run her, the scramble was on to try and put her together. On the third day, she limped back to life on the limbs of some spare bogies collected from various trains.

In the days following, I tried to figure out what happened, who went wrong, where was the law enforcement machinery? What I found was very shameful and disturbing.