Rail Museum – A Heritage?

Flashback to 1995. Summer Vacations. Days that were made of grandparents, mangoes, Famous Five books and constant pleas to show us the Delhi we read about in books. Days that are etched in memory as the best ones ever. Days that now are memories of a time which seems so distant even though it’s so close to the heart. Every year, I would come to Delhi with an agenda to force the elders show me around. Every year, I failed. The excuses ran from it being too hot outside to the places being closed for holidays to the fear of one of the babies falling sick in the heat to just plain laziness. Truth is, no one wanted to shoulder that responsibility to take the kids out in the sun and face the ‘I-told-you-so’ moments if one of us fell sick. So,we were struck playing indoors during the day. We were thankful for the evenings when we were escorted to the nearby park. But, every year a couple of visits to the India Gate kept my hopes alive. Hopes that some day, I’ll be able to convince them to actually take me to the Red Fort or the Qutab Minar or the Doll’s Museum. Rail Museum

And then one summer vacation when the babies were all grown up, it happened. I spent a day admiring the dolls at Doll’s Museum and many consecutive days longing for them. I spent another day at Appu Ghar trying every ride that I could possibly take. From Birla Temple to the Red Fort, from Science Museum to Jantar Mantar -one by one, we visited them all. My bucket list was finally getting checked off and I was frantically adding some more places to it simultaneously.  That’s when someone told me about the Rail-Museum. A single point agenda was developed to visit this place which seemed like a fairyland with a toy-train to show you around. One fine day, we reached there only to find that it’s been closed for maintenance for a few weeks. Sadness engulfed me.

Childhood gave way to teenage and I forgot about the whole thing. The next summer vacation I was more interested in buying weird clothes from Janpath and Sarojini Nagar rather than visiting a museum. After all there is no such thing as too many clothes. Or shoes.Or bags. When I was busy shopping for all things unnecessary, life happened. And then I never remembered how much I wanted to visit the Rail Museum once.

Fast forward to present, I am a part of a wonderful traveller’s group, and one fine day came an announcement that 18th May is celebrated as International Museum Day and that group members have decided to re-claim the museums of the city, to give them the attention they deserve. Even though I could not join them due to work schedules, their updates were responsible for bringing a part of my past back to the foreground. Suddenly, the Rail Museum appeared again and this time I didn’t even need an adult for company. Even though there are no summer vacations anymore, the timing was perfect too! In an alter-life too, I would have seen it during the month of May.

A Saturday afternoon, I found myself at the gates of the Rail Museum,very excited to finally see what’s inside. With memories rushing back and raising my expectations from the museum, I stepped in after sweating in a queue for a Rs 20 entry ticket. I regretted not being able to come here as a child and fuss for a ride on that rickety toy train as well. The idea of rubbing shoulders with sweaty men who would not think twice before touching me inappropriately while cradling a child was all I could imagine how that ride would be today. I brushed that thought away.

Rail Museum hosts many exhibits of trains and engines from an era we have only read about in books. It really is a treasure of information about railways and everything about them. I spent a considerable amount of time reading about the exhibits and the era they belonged to. Each one had a different story behind it but one thing that remained common was how the British revolutionised travel in India. I could imagine these narrow gauge trains with steam engines running away in all their glory of the past.

Can you believe that some of these outdoor exhibits are more than a hundred years old? They are part of our history and heritage, a part of our evolution. They are the building blocks of where we stand today. It broke my heart into a million pieces when I saw how we are treating these pieces of our story. Adjoining each exhibit is a sign that asks visitors to not climb on them. But, we’re Indians and we don’t obey rules unless there is someone forcing us to. I don’t know what pleasure people derived by getting themselves clicked on top of these trains. Or by letting their kids climb and jump and make a ruckus on these exhibits which are already so fragile they could hardly bear the weight. It felt that these old trains were being reduced to a theme park of sorts instead of it being a museum where one is not really supposed to touch things, let alone climbing on them. I wanted to go tell them to read what the sign board said. But then picking up a fight with a stranger in Delhi is not a good idea. You never know who their dad could be. So, I decided to leave a feedback instead of telling people to read the sign boards.

I then moved to the indoor exhibits area but my mind stayed outside where people were bent on destroying every piece of exhibit possible. I could not gather much except cribbing about how we don’t take our heritage seriously and how we don’t believe in preserving it for the future generations. Instead, we want to have it to ourselves, be the ones who destroyed the remains and be proud of that fact with a selfie to boast about it. Do you know how it feels to see a museum being destroyed by supposedly civilized people who claim their culture to be best in the world? Heartbreaking is the word.