In Railsong, Rahul Bhattacharya tells the India story through the twin melting pots of the Indian Railways and Bombay

World War I was imposed on the statesmen of Europe by railway timetables, AJP Taylor famously wrote, referring to the long-planned schedules for mobilising troops that, arguably, made the mobilisation itself inevitable once the first spark was lit. A ghost of that inexorable logic flits by in Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong, when the Indian Railways’ reason for not implementing an advisory to reduce the booked speed of old, unsafe coaches is that “the coaches were in poor condition partly due to public agitations, the public agitations were due to delays and cancellations, hence lowering the booked speed of trains would create further delays and reduce further the number of services, which would lead to further public agitation and cause further damage to the coaches”. It makes sense to Char