My brother was to travel in train today from Bangalore. As he was travelling in a general compartment, where you buy a general seat ticket & find a seat (if lucky) & sit till your destination! We reached the railway station in time & the train was arriving at the station. A guy came to us asking, if we had to catch a seat in the arriving train & that he would do that for a sum of 30/- ($0.75). Now that is something very new I have come across recently. Coolies or help guys are common in India, who carry your baggage to the taxi stand outside the station. But this kind of earning money was surprising, weirdly innovative & kinda funny after a while. As my uncle and I discussed about it later, we thought with the population we have in India & the percentage of people getting quality education being less, men like our "seat-catcher", have to find new ways of earning their livelihoods. For us, he found a good seat & we paid him his well-earned 30/-. I hope he found more customers like us. Very few Indians would pay for a seat catcher! My uncle should have just thought of the comfort of his son's travel & hence he must have agreed to pay for a seat catcher! And how often do we come across such service! But, it has a chance of becoming a good profession! Good luck "Seat-Catcher" J
Wow that sounds so cool, I would pay him too, he makes an honest living and I will be happy with having a seat - so cool! :)
ReplyDeleteHe needs more customers like you :)
ReplyDelete@Shilps: Don't you remember? We'd used this sort of service when we were returning from IIT after the Techfest. We'd been awake the whole night. In the morn, we were waiting for the train to Pune. Its always overcrowded. So this guy came over and said he'd catch seats for all of us. I think we were about 10+. When the train finally stopped and we got in, he was posed over these two rows of seats, squatting on one foot on one row of seats, the other leg stretched over the second row and with his hand, he had thrown his uparna over the rest of the seats in the first row.
ReplyDeleteHe did a fantastic job and we could sleep all our way back ;)
Ok, I was dead sleepy then. All I remember Shruti, wanting to take a group snap at the mumbai station...and we all were like WTH!! This also I remember bcoz of the snap! :D Surely, some guy on mumbai station should have invented this job! :D
ReplyDelete