ST PETERSBURG: On Tuesday, one of the biggest hits of the 2018 World Cup more or less drew to a close. The first semifinal between Belgium and France was the last game of that mattered to be held outside Moscow — the third-place match will also be held in St Petersburg, but when has that ever been anything more than a glorified friendly? It was also the last time most of the fans used the free train service to shuttle between two cities.
When the Russian government announced that it was planning to schedule 734 free trains with a total of 448,000 seats for fans and journalists, many might have expected a bunch of hastily put-together, crowded carriages with facilities limited to the bare minimum. Instead, what the world got was an amazingly efficient and comfortable ride.
As an Indian, it was a matter of marvel to be on 18 of those and never once be on a train that departed or arrived late. While some reports from the Western media did refer to trains as ‘Soviet-era carriages’, one imagines that is because the trains over there are five-star hotels on wheels. This was far better than almost everything the Indian Railways have to offer.
As soon as you make your way on to the platform, usually when the sun is just setting at 11 pm or when it is just rising at 2 am, the two Provodnistas — your hostesses for the ride — will be waiting for your tickets and your passport.
Upon entry to the carriage — there are usually 15 of those — you will be escorted to the compartment that you will share with three others. And just before the journey starts, the Provodnista will stop by for a final check and a couple of instructions: sweets and souvenirs are available with them, the bar and restaurant are between carriages eight and nine and yes, please don’t flush the toilet paper down the toilets.
There is always the chance that you will end up striking up a conversation with the people you are sharing the compartment with, but the best place for that is the restaurant/bar. A lot of the time, it is packed with fans of the teams contesting, so you find yourself sharing a table with three total strangers, often from different parts of the world. Over a beer, it is difficult to resist conversation.
And you can never guess who you meet and what you will end up talking about. There was the Peruvian who couldn’t stop talking about how Machu Picchu was expensive for foreigners but cheap for the locals, the Kazakh trying to convince players of German origin to turn up for the national team, with whom you inevitably end up discussing the upcoming Asian Cup, the Argentinean who was in the middle of travelling around the world, the Scottish photographers whose accents you could listen to all night and the Brazilian couple from Paris who watched the first few games with their Indian friends, on Indian television with Sunil Chhetri’s expert analysis at half-time.
It is difficult to imagine another exercise from anywhere that has brought more human beings from such diverse backgrounds together — you are in a crowd at pretty much every match or concert but don’t end up sharing a compartment or a table with such a diverse array of people four times a week. That may just be the biggest legacy of Russia’s World Cup.
vishnu.prasad@newindianexpress.com