A Journey on the Rajdhani Express

Reflections on a recent trip to Mumbai after many years

Ryan Floyd

May 24, 2024

I recently traveled to India for the first time since before Covid. I lived there from 2003 to 2005 and have visited several times since. This trip was a revelation, showing how much the country—and I—have changed over the past twenty years.

I moved to Mumbai after a brief stint taking Hindi classes post-college some twenty years ago. I learned a formal style of Hindi, more common in the North, using verb tenses with the "formal you," like in the transitive verb karna, the form kijiye for "please do." Arriving in Mumbai in 2003, I naïvely spoke Hindi to anyone who would listen, only to learn quickly that almost everyone who graduated high school spoke solid English and wasn’t impressed with my rudimentary language skills. In Mumbai, most used the verb tense with the "informal you," karo, a favorite phrase, ek kam karo—do one thing— sounds ridiculous, “ek kam kijiye.” My friends were kind, letting me talk like this for a long time before gently suggesting I should use the less formal "you" instead. I must have sounded like an oddball.

With great anticipation, I traveled to India earlier this year in 2024. I was thrilled to see how the country had evolved particularly since Covid times began. I flew into Delhi and quickly found a chai-wallah on the street. I grabbed a cookie and masala chai, one of my favorite treats. I impressed myself by still being able to read Hindi, though I sometimes miss the letter for Shh. The price for the masala chai and biscuit was 20 Rupees, or about $0.25, in contrast to about 10 INR in 2004 or about $0.22. (Amusingly, the price of a latte in Manhattan hasn’t kept pace with inflation either.)

Living in India twenty years ago, I took trains all over the country. I traveled by sleeper trains to Delhi, Chennai, Kerala, Bhopal, Chandigarh, and throughout Rajasthan and Maharashtra. I probably took 50-100 trips by train, far more than in the United States or even my time living in Europe. I loved those journeys, the tomato soup wallahs, the delicious Gujarati snacks sold through the windows at various stops, the ritual of sitting together with other passengers and enjoying the food. By 2024, I hadn’t taken an overnight train in years, and thought I would try again because it was just so convenient. The train dropping into Mumbai at 8 am. I always traveled “AC Chair Car” class, now called “2 AC class,” with 4-6 beds near each other.

I had my ticket printed, but I was running late that day earlier this year in 2024. I sprinted onto the train, ticket in hand, and found myself with two gentlemen across from me. We spoke in English, though I was proud I could still order my food in Hindi. The people stared at this pale Angrezi man, this American guy, taking the train. They looked decidedly snappier than in other times I visited India, with a brightness in their steps. Perhaps I imagined it, but I think I’m right.

I eat meat, but when I lived in Mumbai twenty years ago, I ate “non-veg” only a few times. I used to cook dal and vegetables in a pressure cooker, eating them for almost all my meals. I enjoyed “dal, chaaval, sabziyan.” So I thoroughly enjoyed the food on the train. The men sharing the berth appreciated that I knew how to eat with my hands without getting food above the “second knuckle.” I enjoyed some tea after the meal with hot water from the red, plastic, insulated thermos. As some guys listened to music on headphones, and I read my book.

My bed was long and flat, where I would read but also rest my feet (without shoes). At the end of the bed, I saw my 23-year-old self on that same berth, having traveled on that same train so many times. He was sitting right there in my mind with his late 1990s baggy khakis with a book in his hands, excited and energized with his plans in life: moving back to America, getting married, finding a new job, wondering where he would live and what career he would have and how he would pay rent. Now, in 2024, I was concerned about my kids and their lives, my parents getting older, and whether our Wi-Fi would break at home as it often does when I travel abroad. (It didn’t). I imagine that in 10-20 years I will take this train yet again and see this 2024 self, smile, and understand his concerns and how things worked out or didn’t. It was a delightful moment to commune with a former self and relate his old worries with current ones.

Jet lag kept me awake while the rest of the train slept soundly. I gazed out of the window, barely able to see the small farmers’ plots of land under the moonlight, with some electrified lights in the distance. Occasionally, I saw giant trains packed with huge, metal, industrial products as I read on my electronic tablet. I couldn’t help but feel inspired.

I had the brilliant idea to roll into meetings straight from the train without showering at a hotel. I always pack lightly because I refuse to check a bag on a plane. But the flip side of this policy is stark: I travel, petrified, that I will spill something on my only shirt. I drank an entire thermos of tea on the train to charge my brain for a day of meetings without getting any of it on my shirt. Well done, man! Then I changed clothes in the moving train bathroom, trying not to drop anything in the toilet, giving myself a small “shower in the sink.” Old friends will realize that I haven’t changed too much from my early 20s in this way. I was ready.

I grabbed a packet of biscuits at the train station and hopped into an Uber. I was pleasantly surprised that the traffic moved. Gone were the days of sitting in the same place for eight minutes at a time, though I’m sure that still happens. I marveled at the various flyovers and bridges through my limited taxi window. I spent the next days in meetings learning about different aspects of the Indian business landscape. I won’t repeat it now because it sounds boringly good: solid per capita GDP, a young country, increasing urbanization, and all that. I had breakfast with a friend at a golf club. Not long ago, yellow blotches of dead grass stained the fairways, but now they appeared uniformly green. When I lived in Ghatkopar in 2004, my apartment complex always had a film of brown on the outside from the city of Mumbai stuck to its off-white paint. Years ago, friends used to tell me that families kept spotless interior homes while the exterior apartment complex may look less pretty. When I recently visited a friend in 2024, the apartment complex shone like a beacon after a recent paint job. I didn’t remember many high-rises from my previous trips, yet they seem to stretch forever in midtown Mumbai now.

I never thought I would appreciate cement so much. I had been reading Robert Caro’s giant biography of Robert Moses before the trip. (I decided not to bring it because its weight and 1300+ pages would have forced me to check my bag.) As a government bureaucrat, Robert Moses centralized power and built most of the bridges and highways in New York City. Like Caro, who is rightfully critical of Moses in many ways, I don’t love the automobile and the world it has wrought. Yet I found myself near Ghatkopar, admiring the massive overpass above my head. I marveled at the new bridges and flyovers that weren’t there in 2005. I loved the wonderful Bandra-Worli Sea Link that hadn’t existed when I would sip coffee and walk along Bandra’s rocky coast. And I particularly admired the new bridges across Mumbai Harbour and Thane Creek. Despite my dislike for cars, I admired how these new highways and bridges changed lives and unlocked potential.

I have always loved maps. As a child, I pulled maps out of National Geographic and put them on my bedroom walls. When I lived in Mumbai twenty years ago, I struggled to find a map. Most streets were named for their relationship to a “landmark,” and one generally didn’t just “walk the city,” like in Paris. Although I have visited multiple times with Google Maps or Uber in my pocket, only this time did I truly appreciate having a map. In my old job, I had to help arrange logistics for pomegranates and grapes going to the main Mumbai seaports, but I didn’t entirely realize that Navi Mumbai was directly east of the main city. It’s as if someone didn’t realize that Brooklyn was east of Manhattan. We just didn’t go there before the bridges were built. Now that part of greater Mumbai is impossible to ignore. I drove over one of the bridges with tremendous excitement, like the first New Yorker to take the Brooklyn Bridge. These giant structures across the harbor open up tremendous opportunities for economic growth. Now Mumbai can expand east towards Pune, and the bridges enable people to move back and forth. I am sure there will be problems and bottlenecks, but I found these giant cement structures incredibly inspiring.

Way back in 2003, when I decided to travel to India as a young man, many of my contemporaries thought it was strange. I’m not kidding when I say many thought India was just the land of only poor people at Mother Teresa’s orphanage. I knew it wasn’t the case and wanted to see for myself. One of my college professors recommended V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization. Naipaul was never a big supporter of his ancestral land, to put it mildly. In this book, he wandered around India in the 1970s observing a sense of malaise and delivering jarring quotations like, “It seems to be always there in India: magic, the past, the death of the intellect, spirituality annulling the civilization out of which it issues, India swallowing its own tail.” I like to read different sides of one perspective. I rounded out this dour book with many others on majestic Indian culture and history. When I arrived, the Manmohan Singh reforms had had real benefits. The economy had opened up, but many were still unsure of the future, as if the bad old days might come back. Naipaul’s characterization fell off the mark, though.

I mention this because on this trip, now that I am older, I see an India that is confident in the world, with free elections for almost a billion adults, providing higher incomes for many, and feeling assured on the global stage. Naipaul’s quotations from A Wounded Civilization sound as if they are from another planet today.

At home in America, the Stress Industrial Complex is massive and growing, seemingly as ubiquitous as oxygen. Newspaper articles, television ads, influencer comments and tips all seem to imply that everyone and everything in America are perpetually stressed and need some product to fix the situation. When I checked into my nice hotel on this trip, the TV had an ad for its visitors. I didn’t write down the exact language, but it was something like: “Are you stressed about the world in general? Does it have you down and paralyzed? Come to our fancy hotel and have an [expensive] massage. You deserve it.” Clearly, this message wasn’t for the people living in Mumbai, working hard to build a living for their families. Stress and tension are natural parts of human existence. I don’t mean to belittle anyone’s stress in South Asia. But the sources and near ubiquity of Western stress contrast widely with the “let’s get it done and move forward” attitude I experienced in Mumbai. So many men continue to commute to work by train standing basically outside of the train with one foot on the platform. Families take their children to visit grandparents all on one motorcycle. The differences in worries between the hotel guest and the family on the motorbike couldn’t be stronger.

I am probably irrationally fond of India and South Asia as a whole. My friends there helped me grow from a clueless 22-year-old to a slightly less clueless 24-year-old. The

tone at most international conferences, now with respect to India is warm and positive. Such a positive tone, on its own, can be a source of concern, however. Sometimes negative sentiment foretells future glory, and sometimes heavily positive sentiment precedes unexpected challenges.

I will mention one notable issue: the huge growth in institutional and retail derivatives trading. From anecdotal evidence, I understand Indian day trading derivatives to be among the most active in the world, driven by retail investors. I’m not sure where this will land, but it’s remarkable to witness. The country has gone from so little household leverage two decades ago to real leverage from derivatives trades and other borrowings. I understand that a loss on one side of a derivatives trade is a gain for another, but I’m not sure how this will play out eventually on a broader scale.

As I sit at my desk back home, I keep thinking of that moment on the Rajdhani Express: me, in my 40s, looking at the end of the berth and seeing my 20-something self like a ghost visible and yet transparent, there but not there, reading or perhaps studying Hindi or Urdu flashcards. It’s easy to look back on a younger, more naïve self and laugh at his awkward baggy pants and overly serious gaze. But this experience of seeing that younger self on the same seat feels like a gift. It’s a gift to commune with that younger self, to comment on how he has changed and grown, still having his own adventures: similar yet different, just like India itself.

This document is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities or investment advisory services. I am the Portfolio Manager of Barca Capital, LLC, but the views I express are my own not necessarily those of my firm.