The Bollywood movie Dil Se may have opened to a lukewarm response at the Indian box office, but one of the song sequences from the movie remains a favourite melody 25 years on. Chaiyya Chaiyya isn’t just memorable just for its catchy tune, but also because it was shot entirely on top of a moving train. Indian heartthrob Shah Rukh Khan pranced around with a group of backup dancers as the train chugged slowly across lush hilly terrain, past tea plantations and over tall viaducts, steam billowing from the old-fashioned engine.
I, too, have travelled on this very train, although my journey was far more comfortable and less precarious than Khan’s. The Nilgiri Mountain Railway (Nilgiri translates to “blue mountain” after the bluish hue the sun casts on the hills), which locals refer to as NMR or more fondly as the “toy train”, is a delightful example of the cliché about the journey being the destination.
Running though Tamil Nadu State, the train is the slowest in India due to an extremely steep gradient on the route. It takes nearly five hours to cover a distance of 46km, climbing from the town of Mettupalayam at the foothills of the Nilgiris up to the hill town of Udhagamandalam – amended by British tongues to Ootacamund and then shortened by Indians to Ooty. The downhill ride back cuts an hour, but the journey by road takes just a fraction of that time.