Any other man would have resigned himself to his fate and led a peaceful, uneventful life, but not this man. A Railway Board policy move that made it mandatory for anyone to be considered for selection as a General Manager to have a minimum of two years’ service, cut short this fine officer’s dreams to retire in that exalted position of the world’s largest railways.
But this son of a Station Master did not allow himself to be enveloped by disappointment and negativity and went on to take up a correspondence course, a diploma in creative writing from the Indira Gandhi National Open University in the 90s. And once done with it, he started researching, marking his tryst with writing – a trait that he said was present in his genes, handed to him from his mother.
That’s Rama Rao Annavarapu, a man who superannuated as Head of Operations in the Eastern Railway, Kolkata, in 1991. Over a decade later, he wrote Tiger of Bhanwar Nallah and other stories, a collection of short stories on the life of railwayman’s family, published by Amazon in August, 2015. Well, that proved to be a dream come true for him for sure, but his satisfaction at what followed a year later, this April, was something beyond his vocabulary.
Rama Rao came out with his next book, ‘Trailing Window-A Journey into Rail History’, a work of in-depth research that is arguably goes into hitherto unexplored areas of the history of Indian Railways, especially pertaining to Eastern India, published by Partridge India. The book per se has several miniscule details that are hitherto unknown to most of the world. Just to cite a few examples, if anyone knowledgeable were asked about when the first train was run, pat would come the reply - 1853 between Bombay and Thane. But the same person would not have a clue that work was on to simultaneously lay Railway lines between Calcutta and Hooghly and then onwards to as far as Peshawar.
A chat with this 80-plus gentleman is a phenomenally-enriching experience. While the British wanted to transport cotton across the Western Ghats and out by sea from Mumbai, they wanted a line in Calcutta primarily for movement of troops among other reasons. These two factors, he swears, is known only to a few historians or senior Railway officers.
History would easily attribute Lord Dalhousie as being instrumental for getting the Railways into India, but that apart, not many know that there were people like R.M. Stephenson who surveyed and prepared a report on the need for rail transport.
