Mass transport making mass news

To be honest, mass transport is often in news. Be it the days of the unsinkable Titanic sinking in the cold Atlantic; be it the train most of which slid in to an overflowing river during the monsoon in India after an engineer braked too hard in order to avoid hitting a cow (killing about 600, perhaps the biggest train disaster ever); or be it the planes that crashed in to the World Trade Centre and miraculously converted them to dust.

But these last few days have been quite something else. First, there were the pilots of Northwest Airlines in the US of A who overshot their destination by 150 miles only, because they were engrossed in a heated discussion about crew schedules for the next month or some such. Excuse me? Sure, you weren't sleeping, but aren't you meant to be flying instead of drawing up the schedule for your crew on your laptop while sitting in the cockpit of an airplane which has 144 passengers on board and is not on the tarmac but at 37,000 feet in the air?

Then, there was Abhishek Gupta who decided to call up GoAir at the New Delhi airport to warn them about a bomb on their Bangalore bound flight. Flight gets delayed, blah blah. Turns out, Mr Gupta was going to be late to catch that same flight, and made the casual call in a bid to buy some time. Now of course, he is doing time, as he should.

And this happened today. The not too frequent incident of a train being hijacked, albeit the second one in India this year. Done by a 'Maoist-backed group', a bunch of 300 or so stopped the train, pulled out the driver and kept him abducted for many hours, while they exchanged gunfire with the armed forces. Anyhow, no damage done, all passengers safe and the 'rebels', who had been demanding release of some of their leaders, all scattered and hid in the nearby forests.

Well, look on the bright side of things. At least you can hope that your travel will get more interesting!