looking out of the train window

i know you know i love train journeys. i took another one today coming back from madrid, a 3.5 hour journey in a superfast train. it was a beautiful landscape and my attention was diverted between the movie on the screen and the movie outside the window.

the movie was interesting, about a syrian migrant in new york, dubbed in spanish. but after a while it started raining. needless to say, the washed green was a treat for the eyes. you could tell where it was raining where the clouds were descending on the earth. and then the patterns struck me. for a while it was slanting drops getting splattered on the pane, and then a few sliding down vertically without a trace. as i wondered, how that was happening, the pane got crowded with more water patterns, almost to the point of getting confusing. then as we stopped at a station, just like an intermission. we started moving again, and by this time it had stopped raining. a completely different movie played out this time. as the train picked up speed, the water drops settled on the pane started getting blown away. between 150 and 180 km/hr it looked like fish swimming leisurely in the sea. as the speed increased to early 200s, the fish became horses galloping across green meadows. soon most of the water had disappeared, but the increasing speed somehow brushed out more drops out of all corners and crevices. late 200s, even touching 300 for a bit, and the drops were now minuscule bullets whizzing past in an action packed sequence. i missed the sound though. then all of a sudden the glass was so clean, all i could see was outside.

but outside encouraged another chain of thought. isn't it the same world everywhere! the same land, mountains, greenery, fields, and the sky. the industrial suburbs outside a big city. the population here is lesser for sure. although the absolute number of cars in barcelona would be the same as those in mumbai. but if i had to take a leaf out of the civilization here, i would take the small towns. and thats probably the nucleus of the difference between developed and developing countries. clean, well developed, and yet simple. no sense of embarrassment in being a small town person. rather there is a pride in the purity, in the simplicity, in being untouched by materialistic madness. i was reading "beyond profit" on the train, a magazine published by Intellecap India which updates everything going on in the responsible business sector. and there is a lot going on, in india and in the world, and not surprisingly there is a common thread to all sane things in life. i wish the villages and small towns of india develop on these lines in the coming years. to the point when you look out of a rain drenched window you cant identify the political affiliations of the land, just its beauty, consistent wherever you go.