While others play badminton, watch Netflix, or read a book for ‘timepass’; a term I find quite cute, I’m caught very often watching steam engine videos.

I believe there is no ferocious, powerful, robust, beast, like the steam engine of yesterday. Even now whenever I want to imagine something more terrible than a dragon, a monster belching smoke, a machine of pure energy, I picture the steam engine.

I still remember the walk to the railway line when I was a child.

There were no TVs those days, and our entertainment lay in books, but when dad got home early, he would have that look in his eye, which meant a walk, and a brisk one it was in the sometimes biting cold to the railway track. Now this was no ordinary line. It lay wedged between two rising hills, and in the centre of both these small hills, ran the tracks.

We walked, my brother and I with stilled excitement, sometimes glancing at each other, grinning because we knew what we were going to experience, and of course on the way, my dad would stop at the vada woman’s hut, where my mother would ask if the vadas were hot, she always said they were, and loaded with those steaming morsels we continued our journey to the tracks.

It was a vantage spot we sat on; on one of the little hills, where there was a bend. Here we could first hear the steam engine but not see it till it took the turn.

We sat in anticipation. The signal went down, and we heard it chugging far away, the build up of sound, no whistle was needed, no horn sounded as we watched half in awe, half in terror, as the furious monster took the bend, and in a synchronized movement of steel, wheels, smoke and steam, it charged, literally lunged towards us.

Oh, what a magnificent spectacle!

And later in subdued silence we ate those vadas imbibing the feeling of the just experienced, majestic power.

But, today that steam engine is no more. The ones that cruise at speeds five times that of the steam monster run silently. Power is noiseless and quiet.

No bluster, no buildup of tension.

And maybe that’s why I love watching those videos: Knowing that all the sound and commotion made by some of our politicians and which fill our papers every day are but a cacophony of noise.

That finally, it’s the silent, sure and swift, that become the strong!

I remember the steam engine, I loved its bluster and fury, I still do, but finally it’s about getting a job done, right? Finally, it’s more than having your pictures looming in all the papers, but reigning over  a sinking economy. It’s more than making peace between warring countries, when Manipur still burns.

It’s much, much more than chest, nay boiler size, and bluster.

It’s about performance..!

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