It’s like executing a dead horse, just to make sure it stays dead. The dak carriers who bore messages across the world’s biggest railway system were already superannuated as the officers they served turned to email. But now, the financial belt-tightening in response to the pandemic has closed around their throats like a noose. They have been replaced by digital communications.
Modernity has ended the romance of the rails, and now, privatisation looms. The drivers’ running rooms with porcelain service and white linen are long forgotten. The station master is no longer a pillar of the community. The neat staff lines beside stations, with their tended gardens, wicker gates and the characteristic earthenware chimneys bent like an upside-down J, are much reduced. Only a few stations remain relatively untouched — picturesque Barog in the hills, and imperial palaces of the age of steel and steam like Howrah and VT. Amidst this general eclipse, will the loss of the dak carrier, the most obscure relic of the colonial era, be noticed very much.
