The Long Way Back

There were still a good 3-4 weeks of my internship left when I started thinking about my journey back home. First the hunt for an internship and then the internship itself kept me from planning my return.But now that I had settled down nicely at Delhi I decided to get to work.
It was only when I sat down to make the reservations did a thought strike me for the first time.....How the hell do I get back home intact and breathing!! With all that's going around in this country the best possible way would have been teleportation, but since there is still some time before that is included in the category of public transport I had to think of a more reasonable way. I had my eyes set on a morning flight for the 21st of June. A morning flight implied that I would be home in time for lunch with mom and dad, for the first time after about 5-6 months. The plan seemed perfect. When...Mangalore happened. A relatively new IA jet overshot the runway, fell into a ditch and burst into flames. The worst part is even after a week of investigation they could not find out whether it was a human error or an equipment failure which led to the crash.Whatever the reason might be, 158 people lost their lives. Since then, not a single day passed when I didn't hear about something or the other happening to a passenger Jet. Tyre bursts, runway overshoots and landing gear malfunctions started appearing like regular columns in newspapers. And with the so called economy airlines almost at the verge of shutting down engines mid-flight to save fuel and further economise the whole process...I decided to give air travel a pass. Somehow a 32 hour train journey was making all the more sense now. So, the reservation was made for the 21st of June.The constant sight of solid ground was definitely going to be reassuring.I was at peace now...assured of a safe journey back home and then....Jhargram happened.I was shattered to say the least...shattered by the death toll, by the carnage....and by the fact that all it took was unscrewing a few nuts and removing a little strip of the track. Indian Railways has been no stranger to collisions and derailments...but this was different.....this was mass murder.From attacking wealthy landlords and politicians to such indiscriminate killing, the Naxalite movement had come full circle.
Suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, things started coming back to me.Firozabad, Khanna, Mumbai, Godhra....it was like a series of unfortunate events. An article on Wikipedia exclusively dedicated to Indian Rail incidents was a testimony to its safety standards! It had an entry for almost every year for the past 50 years!!.Indian Railways my #$$....it was death on wheels!!!...like a moving time bomb just ticking away..
How the hell did I miss that!! I felt so stupid...hoping for a safe journey on a medium which served for the last journey of more than 10,000 people in the last decade itself.And then an even greater realisation....my journey back home would be through the epicentre of the Naxalite movement.This is definitely not what I had planned...I was cornered...with nowhere to go.I was left wondering that if by some gods grace the Indian railways don't screw me up....some extremist wacko surely will.
Some time has passed since I had that panic attack and am back to my senses now. I think I might have over reacted a little there. All the hysteria was probably because of the excitement of going back home.Anyway, the ticket still lies there on my table....reminding me at every instant, that life is really really unpredictable and that teleportation is still not feasible.