I have a love of trains and one of my favourite movies is about a train ride through India – The North West Frontier (also called called Fire over India). Starring Lauren Bacall if I remember correctly, who sadly died just recently.

The story centres around a small Hindu prince rescued by the British before his father is murdered by Muslims. The British have to get the boy away from the rebellion and to safety, and they do so by train, a small train one carriage and a whole conclave of different people travelling together.

I can remember that my dad used to wake me up when I was very little to watch it with him. There were a few shows he would do that and this was always one of them and my favourite. Although I think I mostly slept I can still remember being entranced by the movie, hence I have a copy.

And here I sit on my first Indian train ride and it is somewhat different to say the least. But as I look out my window at the landscape raging past there is a certain similarity.

The plains stretch out forever both ways. On my left I can see distant large mountains framed by golden light as the sun descends, and on my right I can see the sky tuning grey over uncountable fields of rice trimmed by the odd group of palms. A break in the scenery sees a thatched village with kids playing volleyball in the dirt barefoot.

As we left the station in Madras I saw the backs of slums lined up to the railway tracks, kids playing in torrid mud and filth with boars and cows, and water tinged with a deadly luminescent glow but a child stand barefoot in it playing nonetheless. A patch of dirt opens to a soccer field and the locals fight it out as a gentlemen squats next to the tracks to take a shit while watching the train go by ( a very frequent scene as I was to discover) It’s a surreal scene and more so than anything I have seen yet. It’s a simple basic scene of a basic sense of simple living. The sheer amount of rubbish breaks any belief that the place can be cleaned and fixed, so unsurmountable is the filth and rubbish and so intrenched, it’s a beautiful and yet horrific scene of raw life. And it’s not restricted to the slums. Everywhere along the great rails of India at every town or village the filth and degradation is piled up.