Two years ago, I found myself flanked by some of the sharpest minds of our times— Gopalakrishna Gandhi, Gandhiji’s grandson, whose calm intellect could humble a storm, Vijay Amritraj, who’d volley words with the same finesse he did tennis balls at Wimbledon and Shashi Tharoor, who spoke online, with his thundering Oxford diction.

Me? I stood on that stage with just a story, which is really all I ever have.

It was about four boys. Not Tharoor, not Gandhi, and certainly not Amritraj. Just four boys on a railway bridge between Chetpet and Nungambakkam. Boys who looked like you and me, if we were half our age and twice as foolish.

They were fighting—no, not over a girl or a cricket match—that would have been too sensible. They were battling over vegetarian vs. non-vegetarian, mosque vs. mandir, Hindi vs. Tamil. You know, the kind of debates that make front page headlines, family WhatsApp groups, and prime-time TRP festivals.

And while they hurled slurs and fists, jostling to throw each other off the bridge and into the Cooum River below, which, given its current state, might have been the harshest punishment of all, something else was happening.

A train was coming.

Slowly. Silently. Relentlessly.

The engine driver wasn’t your typical moustached man in a starched uniform.

No, this one had a different look in his eye and a more dangerous agenda in his heart. He was stoking his engine not with coal, but with discarded ideals—democracy, equal rights, free speech, press freedom—burning them one by one like dry wood.

The boys, of course, didn’t notice.

They were too busy arguing whose god was better, whose food purer, whose mother tongue motherlier. And the engine drew closer.

Now, you’d think one of them would shout, “Get off the track!” or “Look out, a train!” But nobody did. Because they were wearing blindfolds that didn’t allow them to see the real danger while they were busy fighting smaller ones.

You see, the engine driver is clever. He doesn’t mind our squabbles.

In fact, he loves them. Every time we fight about beef bans or Bollywood boycotts, he shovels another constitutional right into the furnace. Every time we troll someone on social media for thinking differently, he smiles and throws a freedom into the flames.

And the train keeps coming.

What I said to that audience—those brilliant minds and discerning ears—was this: unless we stop bickering long enough to look up, the train won’t just knock the boys off the bridge. It’ll flatten the bridge. The river. The city. The very democracy we take for granted, and flatten you and me under its wheels.

So today, if you hear a distant whistle, it’s not your imagination.

It’s the sound of everything we value hurtling toward us.

It’s two years since I spoke. Time to stop fighting, boys, the train is coming even faster today…!

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