Meat on rails….That’s exactly how I felt today..waiting at the local station to board the train to Secunderabad. My colleague and I decided to leave early today and try the Metro rail service and reach main city and do some shopping! I work in a large IT firm which has one of it’s offices in Gachibowli, Hyderabad. Gachibowli, is on the outskirts of Hyderabad, in a village called Manikonda! It is home to some of the big IT giants like Infosys, Wipro, HSBC, UBS and one of the finest B-schools, ISB!That’s some useless dope I know! But I’m trying to think and so you’ll just have to live with the useless gyaan!So B (that’s how I’d like people to know her!) and I wrapped up by 3.50 so we could leave office by 4. We got to the main gate and went through the usual rigmarole of the guards checking our belongings for so-called bombs! We were out of campus at 4.10 and managed to find a share-auto (for those of you who are new to this concept, it is a 3-wheeler vehicle that can carry anywhere between 2 people to 5 people minus the driver!) that took us till the main road and from there, we ended up taking a 7-seater auto again!B and I sat in an almost dead-lock position which to passer-bys must have been a nice TO. This was not by choice of course! The 7-seater had 11 people all crammed up!We finally managed to reach Lingampalli station at 4.35 with only a few minutes to spare for our train, or so we thought! My saga starts here….I decided to abuse my right of equality and stood at the special “Ladies” queue. I say abuse cos I am someone who’s pro-equality and here I was ready to forego my right just so I could get 2 tickets for my friend and myself! The person at the ticket counter noticed me standing behind a man and decided to ignore him completely so he could get on to serving me…I spoke through the opening at the counter and asked for two tickets, I am not sure he really heard what I said cos he was busy sizing me up! I repeated myself and to my surprise he was actually GOOD at multi-tasking! He handed me the tickets and the change and I happily walked out of the place cos I was elated at getting back 40Rs when I had handed him 50Rs, which means I’d spent only 5 Rs on a trip that would have otherwise cost me at least 150 Rs!B and I finally made our way into the station and started looking out for a place to sit..I chose to stand instead, depriving people of a view of whatever cleavage was visible!This was my first experience of a Local train in a city where I’ve spent almost 3/4th of my life! And what an experience it was! To me, it looked like most of the people were coming across a whole lotta mass for the very first time! Mass that’d add up to the mass of their entire family put together probably!! I had almost every man of every age look me up and down, more than a few times and that’s when I decided to reciprocate by cold hard stares! Some of the men were so engrossed in their act that they didn’t realize I was staring back at them! For me, it was more of a show of my longest finger and choicest abuses through my eyes!I am not sure whether it was the maroon nail enamel I had on my fingernails, or the red tee that I had on that drew so much attention but I most certainly felt like a nice piece of meat on rails!