Delhi Metro: The Prolonged Joyride

In the haphazard conundrum of the Capital City of India, even though one wants to sit comfortably in the backseat of a car when one needs to travel from one place to another, they do not do it for the mere fact that most of them do not own a car and cannot afford to take a cab for their everyday commute and wanderings. Hence, they take the Delhi Metro, which is not that bad. It is safe and secure and keeps us away from the well-known Delhi traffic.

The thought of taking the Metro every day is quite exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. I wore myself out by taking the Metro, but it was exciting to observe all sorts of people. Different people every day. It was as bizarre as it was real because they seemed perfectly all right doing all these things when you looked at them. I would say it was better to take the Metro because I had gotten used to it.

Most of the time when I was in the Metro, I sat in the women’s coach because it smelled better than the regular coaches, and females did way more cracked-up things than all the sexes in the world combined. When I sat in the regular coaches, people came in hoping to find a seat to park themselves. However, in the women’s coach, it was entirely different. If the coach was crowded, they took up any seat they could get. However, if there were no seats available, they came and requested others to squeeze themselves, so they could park half of their behinds on the seat, like when you try to hang one more of your coats on a hanger that is already overloaded with a week’s worth of used clothes.

Let us suppose the coach is almost half-full. That is when they enter and try to find the corner seat. That is not at all odd because I did that too. The corner seat is kind of the first class of the Metro because only one-half of your body touches strangers’ cooties.

It is like a set of televisions stacked together, like those at a news channel office. The people travelling in the Metro seem like they are doing stand-up monologues or rather Charlie Chaplin mimes. Everywhere I looked, there was a person doing something different, although almost everyone had an earphone plugged into their ears.

A girl was filing her nails and spreading her nail dust everywhere to my horror. Also, there were these very innocent-looking young ladies who, from their appearance, looked like hospitality executives of some four- or maybe five-star hotel establishments. They wore comfortable-looking rubber slippers, as it seemed like they were exhausted from wearing heels all day at work. Still, they seemed content and were chattering among themselves gleefully. All the females were doing things that needed to be done, while these men had nothing better to do than ogle unabashedly at all these females.

When you live in a metropolitan area, you realise how many efforts people make just to get by. The Metro helps, of course. It helps people like us save money, which in today’s world is a very important thing. People enter the Metro sweating because of the humidity, but the air conditioner bestows a soothing effect, and they can stand in the almost full coach unperturbed.

A middle-aged woman with a backpack, coming back from work because it’s almost evening and they are weary; an adolescent female child wearing a tracksuit coming back from sports practice; a very adorable-looking girl wearing a ton of makeup and reading a book, hoping to get some attention; a very unusually disgruntled-looking woman freaking out everyone around her, and many others take the Delhi Metro every day.

According to the current Delhi Metro network information, the Delhi Metro today has 303 stations across its wider network, covering more than 416 kilometres when the Noida-Greater Noida Aqua Line and Gurugram Rapid Metro are included. The core Delhi Metro network itself comprises 271 operational stations and approximately 374.5 kilometres of operational network. Over the years, what began as a relatively small urban transport system has grown into one of the most important lifelines of Delhi and the National Capital Region.

And the Metro is no longer the only rapid transport system changing the way people travel across the National Capital Region.

For me, this becomes particularly interesting because of the Delhi–Meerut Namo Bharat corridor. Having now lived in Meerut, I can appreciate this connection in a way I could not have when I first wrote this article. The 82-kilometre Delhi–Meerut corridor connects Sarai Kale Khan in Delhi with Modipuram in Meerut, passing through several important centres of the NCR. The entire corridor became operational in February 2026.

Namo Bharat is different from the Delhi Metro in its purpose. While the Metro primarily helps people move around a city and its surrounding urban areas, Namo Bharat is designed to connect cities and reduce the effective distance between them. It links Delhi, Ghaziabad, and Meerut through a dedicated regional rapid transit system (RRTS), making travel between these places considerably more convenient.

When I got married and came to Meerut with my husband for our first posting, I realised that although Meerut had plenty of shopping outlets and local bazaars of its own, I still missed the shopping streets and markets of Delhi. Whenever I wanted to go shopping, Namo Bharat made it surprisingly easy. I could take the train from Meerut and reach Anand Vihar in roughly 40 minutes, with the journey generally taking no more than about 45 minutes. From Anand Vihar, I could simply switch to the Delhi Metro and travel to wherever I wanted to go in Delhi. It was quick, comfortable, affordable, and, most importantly, I never felt that travelling from Meerut to Delhi was some enormous undertaking.

There was another occasion when I truly appreciated just how useful this connectivity was. When my parents came to visit me, they had to catch a train from New Delhi Railway Station to Varanasi. My husband was busy with work and could not take them by car, so I took them myself. I travelled with them from Meerut to Delhi on Namo Bharat, continued by Metro to New Delhi Railway Station, dropped them there for their train, and then made my way back. What could have felt like a complicated and exhausting journey turned out to be surprisingly simple. The journey was comfortable, safe and quick, and I did not have to worry about driving through the notorious Delhi traffic or arranging a car for the entire day.

That is when I truly understood what good public transport can do. It does not merely take you from Point A to Point B. It gives you independence. It makes distances less intimidating. It allows you to make plans without first wondering how you are going to get there. For me, Namo Bharat became more than just a new train service; it became a convenient bridge between my life in Meerut and the Delhi I had once known so well.

What fascinates me most is the way these different systems are beginning to connect the region into one large, accessible network. The Delhi Metro takes people through the city, while Namo Bharat connects the larger region. A person can live in one city, work in another, study somewhere else, and still remain connected to all of them. The distances remain the same on a map, but they somehow feel much smaller when there is a train waiting to take you across them.

The difficult picture that I tried to paint today through this article of my very own ‘Delhi Metro’ was one of the most effortless yet convoluted things I ever thought of writing. Of all the things worth noticing in Delhi, like the ancient monuments, the food, the fashion, the culture, the passion that people have about everything, the art, and many more, the Metro is one of the most crucial and needed parts because it enables people to achieve most of the above-mentioned things. It takes people where they want to go. It saves their time and money, and most of all, keeps them safe.

Perhaps that is what makes the Metro so fascinating. It is not merely a train system. It is a moving cross-section of the city itself — carrying office-goers, students, tourists, workers, dreamers, tired people, and people-watchers like me, all in the same coaches, heading somewhere.

And now, with Namo Bharat stretching that connection beyond Delhi, even the cities around it seem a little closer.

One station, one journey, one person at a time.