The grand old railways website

I regularly visit the Indian railways site http://www.indianrail.gov.in/ to schedule journeys, track waitlisted tickets and do other trains related stuff. There was a time when visiting this site had sort of become my hobby. It started with ‘Trains at a glance’, a book that contains train schedules of all the major trains. As a kid, I used to follow the book keenly trying to create perfect travel plans for the next family vacation. I can’t explain why I liked this; I simply did. That was the time when the site was manageable because of its decent response time & because it didn’t have any ads. My memory is bad, but I guess this was not more than four years ago.

But then the “massacre” started. No, there is no other word to describe the pounding that the huge number of ads gave you when you dared to visit the website. I guess popup blockers were not very popular then. At least I didn’t know of them. I was forced to give up on my hobby. Soon I lost interest and just let it be.

There of course used to be times when I urgently needed to get information, and visiting the website was the only option. And boy, did I dread those times? There was a thorough ritual to be followed before opening the website. I would close all programs, windows etc. that I was working on. I used to open a single browser window that would innocently occupy one corner in my taskbar. No sooner had I entered the address followed by the enter key, the whole place would go ballistic. One after one, the popups would crowd the desktop. The taskbar would have around ten to twenty different buttons with just one of any importance to me. The game would then start. Would the popups appear faster or would I be able to close them faster? My experience in FPS games like Quake and Unreal definitely came handy here. Unfortunately there was a new problem now. If I closed all the popup windows, the parent website, would refuse to process any of my requests. I don’t know how they managed that, but I would get a timeout response if all the popups were mercilessly killed. Soon I learnt how to manage with one or two popups open.

But now I have got good news to share. And nothing could be better. Yesterday I was trying to sneak my way inside without causing the commotion that is usually associated with visiting the website. And the most pleasant thing happened. I did not encounter any popups. Zilch, zero, null, naught, nil, absolutely none! And I was not even using Firefox. Now that is a rare something good happening in this unfortunate atmosphere of reservations, crashing stock markets, and general gloominess.