by High-speed rail photo opportunity achieves record speed of 320km/h; actual train still doing paperwork
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
India Satire: The Train That Will Arrive Eventually
SURAT, GUJARAT — Prime Minister Modi visited the bullet train station in Antroli Village, Surat, this month, in what the government described as “an inspection visit” and infrastructure historians describe as “a photograph taken at an extremely expensive construction site.” The Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail corridor, India’s first bullet train project, is scheduled for partial completion by 2026 and full completion by a year that officials have described, at various points since 2017, as “the near future.”
The station itself is an impressive structure of glass, steel, and ambition — the kind of building that would anchor a thriving downtown in Japan, where bullet trains run on two-second schedules and the concept of “delays” causes genuine national distress. In India, where the existing railway network operates 13,000 trains daily across the world’s largest rail network and delays are measured in hours with the same casual acceptance that Europeans apply to minutes, the bullet train represents something philosophically interesting: the aspiration to become Japan while remaining definitively India.
The Numbers: Very Large, Very Impressive, Somewhat Abstract
The Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train corridor involves 508 kilometres of track, 12 stations, and a budget that has expanded in the way of all large infrastructure budgets — upward, consistently, with the confidence of something that has no reason to stop. The project involves Japanese financing, Japanese technology, and Japanese project management principles, combined with Indian land acquisition law, Indian bureaucratic processes, and Indian contractor timelines, which is either a historic synthesis of civilisations or a test of which force is stronger.
Early indications suggest it is a tie, to be settled in arbitration sometime after the train is running, at which point everyone will have forgotten what they were arguing about and will be too busy riding the train to care, which may be the intended resolution.
What A Bullet Train Means To India
For a nation where the trains are loved, overcrowded, chronically late, and constitutive of the national experience in a way that no highway can replicate, the bullet train is not merely transport — it is a statement. It says: India is not only the country of chai vendors on station platforms and families of six sharing an upper berth; India is also the country of 320 kilometres per hour and station architecture that makes international travellers feel they’ve arrived somewhere impressive.
Both Indias are true. The upper berth India and the bullet train India are the same country, which is the most interesting thing about India and the thing that makes it simultaneously the most exciting and most frustrating place on earth to be an infrastructure planner.
Reuters has reported that despite delays and cost overruns, the project remains on track — in the sense that the physical track is being laid, even if the metaphorical track of original timelines departed the station some years ago. Japanese officials have been diplomatic about this. Japan is very good at being diplomatic, which is arguably its most useful export to the partnership.
The Photo: Certified Historic
Modi’s photograph at the Antroli station will circulate on BJP social media for the next several years as evidence of infrastructure development, which it is, in the sense that he was photographed at infrastructure that is being developed. The actual train will arrive when it arrives. India will celebrate it enormously when it does. The celebration will be entirely justified. The photo will then be circulated again with new captions. This is how megaprojects work in democracies, particularly ones with very active social media cells and very long infrastructure timelines.
More India satire: Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
The Indian summer is not a season; it’s a collective punishment for the sins of the entire subcontinent, and the only relief is air conditioning and comedy.
In Indian comedy, the corrupt politician is not a villain; he’s a recurring character who somehow keeps getting re-elected, which is the real joke.
The Indian summer is not a season; it’s a collective punishment for the sins of the entire subcontinent, and the only relief is air conditioning and comedy.