MITRA: Make India travel by rail again

India's air - the one we breathe, and the one we hurtle across in planes - is toxic. Plane ticket prices are even pinching the horsebit loafers of high-fliers. Passengers are stranded, and the only thing flying reliably is your BP. Clearly, it's time for a new national mission, for a nation more obsessed with acronyms for campaigns than campaigns themselves: MITRA - Make India Travel by Rail Again.

Why wrestle with check-in counters that resemble war zones even with IndiGone when you could glide into a station, sip chai, and board a train that actually leaves on time? Imagine rail travel not as the dusty relic of your grandparents' honeymoon to Bodh Gaya, but as a sleek, high-speed, Wi-Fi-enabled capsule zipping through landscapes that aren't turbulent. MITRA demands we reinvent Indian Railways into a comfort carnival: reclining seats that don't resemble airplane-style sitting coffin space, food that tastes like khana, and restrooms that don't double as Jackson Pollock canvases. Efficiency? Let's make trains run with Swiss precision, Japanese punctuality and Indian warmth. The skies may be collapsing under the weight of airline mayhem, but the rails must be made polished and ready. MITRA, not 'Mitron', is the answer to travel within India not taking out weeks of your anyway AQI-high truncated life. Chuck planes. Get on a train DDLJ-style.