Indian Railways Employ Wrestlers to Intimidate Fare Dodgers

By Tom Thumb, Posted Dec 10, 2009

crowded indian train

It's not even rush hour. http://www.flickr.com/photos/erin_can_spell/

Pay up or get a brutal half-nelson. Yep, it’s still India.

India may be changing fast but there’s still plenty of room for whimsical invention on the subcontinent – one of the latest attempts to bring about a modern society by doing away with ‘ticketless evil’ on the railways is to hire boxers and wrestlers to intimidate fare dodgers

It takes me back to when I was hitchhiking to India was on the last leg when I jumped on a train overnight from Pune. When the ticket inspector turned up at 3am I was surprised, to say the least. I was soon astonished as the rural lad in front of me admitted to having no ticket and the inspector stood back and gave him a full length kick in the thigh.

When he came to me I said my line about being a pilgrim and so needing no ticket and he just rolled his eyes and walked on, saying:

‘What are you doing in India?’

Which was a harder question to answer than where is your ticket?


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Hand to Mouth to India is the tale of when I hitchhiked from England to India at the age of 20 with no money at all.


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Tales of a Road Junky covers the last 12 years of my journeys around the world. telling the tale of coming of age in the Goa trance scene, rescuing foreign prisoners in Delhi, selling fake Rolex watches in the street in Tokyo, getting into trouble with the medicine mafia in Brazil and delving deep into the heart of Israelity in the Promised Land.


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Imagine you, the room you’re in, the planet and everyone in it were all just a Story, figments of imagination in the mind of a Storyteller. But with Hoomanity set on self-destruction, the Storyteller’s health begins to fail and if he should die, what would become of the Story that he tells?


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