Hundred kids and a disgruntled old man
The journey from Delhi to Mumbai has always been a memorable experience. Ditto the last one. Somehow, I always seem to end up with irritating people. Be it compulsive drinkers (who make it a point to have a drinking session in the train, and laugh a lot after they get the 'kick') or, hyper-active school kids, who happened to surround me this time. There were so many of them, and most of them seemed to have never been on a long-distance train. They didn't quite have to tell that they were from 'Activity High School', Peddar Road. Because activity is all what they did! They were from Std X.
The kids were returning from a 'educational tour' of the North, more specifically Agra (and Fatehpur-Sikri), and Delhi. Their tutors, may be in a bid to keep them busy, had asked them to write 15 sides about the monuments they had visited. Much to the tutors' expectations, and co-passengers' trauma, their plan flopped -- the kids started writing, the train sped-up, their writing jumbled. Then the tutors changed the requirement from writing to marking on the tourist guide each of them had. On and on, the requirements kept changing, the kids kept shouting. The requirements ceased, the kids shouted even more! :P Many of them seemed rich. With their iPods and Sony T-33s and talks about old PSs and new PS2s.
What disgusted me the most was their lack of concern for co-passengers, however elder they may be.(Okay, all of them addressed me as 'Uncle' but I've quit minding that anymore, so that was not as disgusting.) On one of the occasions, a kid asked an elderly man to mind his own business when the man was looking towards him, after a tussle between the kid and a caterer. The elderly seemed pissed off and gulped the hand-picked obscenities owing to the age of his opponent.;)
And I remember how, when I was young(er), I used to chuck all notions brought forth me about the social values being depleted. I used to laugh it off, in a what-else-is-new manner when I heard some elder say "there's no respect for elders left". Undoubtedly, people, back then, would have made this statement after observing something similar.
I thought what would be society like when I am the age of that shocked elderly gentleman.