To put GL's post in perspective, he seems to now hold the view that Byculla Rly station like others on the Central Railway local line was a DUMP (his caps not mine). Perhaps his US residence allows him the luxury of that hindsight. Even being a dump and all, I notice he took the train from there to KEM Hospital although he had the option of a much cleaner (but costlier) BEST bus ride.
KEM by today's Indian hospital standards was a dump too. Also it was in a sub sanitary neighbourhood. But to patients it was a free hospital and all of this didn't stop GL from getting his doctor's degree from its teaching unit and using it as a diving board to a better future. What he paid there to get a basic doctor's degree seems like peanuts in today's India, let alone today's USA so GL should have had gratitude for his past rather than disgust. Even on today's Long Island Rail Road, starting from Penn Station in New York City, probably the richest city in the capitalist world, most of the railway stations seem like dumps, so it would be unfair to write off their counterparts in a socialist 60s impoverished India with slights like GL used. Returning to Byculla Railway Station, it was a transit point for vegetable and fruit vendors carrying their day's goods from the wholesale market to their retail locations on heavily-loaded wicker baskets balanced on their heads. Produce often fell onto the roads and in the station. Railways cleaners did their best to sweep up, but with the thousands passing through, it was a losing battle. As it must have been for the ward boys within KEM hospital and their cleaners outside. Byculla station itself is correctly identified as a heritage location. It resembles an early 1900s British India railway halting point and the city will have one more historic reminder of its past. If they decide to restore it, I am sure that it will be brought to a cleanliness standard worthy of a archaeological survey of India site and perhaps making it this time a station that Gilbert Lawrence would happily pass through. GL writes "I lived in Byculla for a major part of my life in Bombay. During that time I took the commuter train (local) daily from Byculla rail station to Parel station to get to my medical school in KEM hospital in Parel. The Byculla rail station like most stations along the Central Railway line in the 1960s and 1970s and later was a DUMP. And likely it continues to be so today. To want to preserve the rail station "the-way-it-was", the researchers or historians need to get their head examined and perhaps move to or live in or near the rail station for a month. The photographic views always look nice from a particular angle and in perfect light. The view is different in the hot summer, monsoon, peak of harvest, etc. etc. For the last decades, these nostalgia-lovers could have worked and clamored for a restoration of the train stations to minimum sanitary and civil standards using a combined effort of the local government, railway authorities and the local neighborhoods." Roland Francis 416-453-3371
