Between Platforms and Projectors

 My whole life has been one long transit.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

I think I have spent a major part of my life either waiting for a bus, hanging from one, missing a train, sleeping through stations, or trying to convince myself that an unknown city would somehow start feeling like home.

I started travelling alone quite early. The first big one was leaving home for Delhi to study at the University of Delhi. Back then, getting student flight concessions felt harder than getting a government job, so buses became part of life. Guwahati was less a place and more a repeated ritual of overnight journeys, stiff necks, oily roadside tea, and collective fear whenever the bus entered certain stretches of road where everyone suddenly became quiet.

Once, in peak confidence and poor planning, I even hitched a truck ride to Guwahati just to catch a train. I missed the train anyway. The truck driver probably reached before me emotionally.

Train journeys deserve their own chapter. Indian trains can give you philosophy, friendship, theft, and trauma in one ticket. During one journey, I got punched and my Walkman was snatched. What hurt more was not the punch but the loss of music for the rest of the trip. Silence becomes very dramatic when you are twenty and travelling alone.

In Delhi, survival depended heavily on the DTC bus pass. That tiny piece of paper was my real degree. Cheap, folded, slightly sweaty, always hiding somewhere in my pocket. It carried me from my rented room to college every day — thirty minutes if Delhi traffic was merciful, forty-five if the city had decided to punish everyone equally.

But those buses did more than transport me. They educated me. I saw Delhi through bus windows: winter fog over North Campus, overheated conductors shouting routes, students hanging from doors like action heroes, couples pretending not to know each other when relatives entered the bus. I probably understood the city better from route numbers than maps.

One day I almost died in the most Delhi way possible.

While getting off a moving bus, I slipped and got dragged for a short distance while clinging to the door rail with both feet dangling in the air. For a few seconds I looked less like a university student and more like discounted stunt choreography. Somehow I escaped without injury. Delhi buses and I respected each other after that.

Around my third year, the Delhi Metro finally opened its first line from North Campus to New Delhi Station. Suddenly Delhi discovered air-conditioning and discipline. The metro was clean, fast, and painfully expensive for someone like me. There was no proper pass system then, only metro cards with small discounts. I still remember paying ₹50 as deposit for the card because whenever I became completely broke, I would return the card, collect the deposit money, survive for another day, and later buy another card again. It was less public transport and more emergency savings account.

After coming home, I appeared for the Film Appreciation Course interview and didn’t get selected. Rejection is also a kind of travel. Around that time I met filmmakers from Manipur and slowly started learning through experience — carrying equipment, observing shoots, listening more than speaking.

The next year I got selected at Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, and that journey changed everything. Until then I watched films. After FTII, I started seeing cinema everywhere — in streets, silences, railway platforms, faces inside buses.

After the course I received job offers in Delhi, but then a friend assembling a team in Bombay asked me to join him. So once again: another train, another platform, another uncertain beginning.

Bombay was strange because I had visited before for my mother’s treatment, but living there alone was different. The city moved too fast to notice loneliness, but loneliness notices everything. Radio became important. I would board local trains with no destination in mind and get down wherever the city decided. Sometimes at Churchgate, sometimes Dadar, sometimes stations whose names disappeared from memory before evening. Bombay teaches you that even being lost requires stamina.

Then came Europe.

One of the biggest journeys of my life.

Yes, this was when the UK was still technically part of Europe, before geography became political comedy.

I spent half a month in Barcelona and another half in Portugal. Barcelona felt alive all the time, like even the walls had confidence. Portugal felt slower, softer, like a song playing in another room. Then came London — a week of cold rain and weather that looked permanently disappointed.

And then I landed back in Delhi.

The ground shook slightly beneath me at the airport, and for a few seconds I genuinely could not understand what was happening. I stood there wondering whether it was jet lag, exhaustion, emotional damage, or an actual earthquake. After weeks of planes, trains, metros, buses, local trains, and unfamiliar beds, even standing still felt like movement.

Looking back now, I feel my life can be mapped entirely through transport systems.

DTC bus passes. Sleeper-class trains. Trucks to Guwahati. Bombay locals. Metro cards returned for ₹50. Flights taken with anxiety and hope. Every journey carried a version of me that did not fully know where it was going.

Maybe that is why cinema made sense eventually.

Cinema also moves.