In early 2004, I was travelling in a 2nd class sleeper compartment from Bangalore to Madras. I found myself sitting opposite a elderly man, slender, almost entirely bald, dressed in a white dhoti and grey checked shirt. He was the epitome of elegant simplicity – freshly shaven, with a wispy moustache that was neatly trimmed, spotless dhoti, and a well-worn steel wristwatch – probably HMT.

Shortly after the train started moving, he asked me about my job. He spoke good English with a barely discernible keralite accent. Like any Indian man in his early 20s, I was wary of such conversations, because it invariably moved to salary, marital status, then religious denomination, and often advice to get married “without delay”.

However, this conversation was different. He asked me about my office, the working conditions, and when I told him about my late-night Call-Centre job, he went into details about overtime, medical support for people who fell ill on the job, maternity leave policies, etc. The more I told him, his expression tensed – and he listened, barely blinking, but his voice was always kind, with a sort of hypnotic energy. 

There was an  electric interlude – as quiet as it could get in a second class train compartment  – as he seemed to digest everything that I’d said. 

“You fellows need to form a union”

An involuntary laugh escaped me. 

“What’s so funny? Do you feel there is any dignity in the way that your company is making you work?”

His wife rolled her eyes with an anguished “ai-yai-yoh”. 

He then started to tell me about the collective power of the working class. “Don’t think you are  bourgeoisie – the moneyed class – just because you’re working on a computer.” he said to me. “Factory workers who are united have better lives than you.”

What followed was a crash course in Communism, and in some ways I was quite convinced. My heart was soaring when he told me about Trotsky’s ideas – ideas so dangerous, that a fellow Communist cracked his head open with a mountaineer’s axe. Our discussion became increasingly animated until his wife and three other passengers unionized and used their collective clout to silence us so that they could raise the middle berths and sleep. 

Early the next morning, as the train approached Madras, he handed me two pamphlets – one was about the history of the workers’ struggle and the other was about Trotsky. Both of these were written in simple English, and illustrated in the style of Indian pulp fiction from the 1990s. He wrote down the phone number of the Bangalore bureau, and asked me to get in touch with them when I was back in town, so I could “join the revolution”.

I never made that call, and obviously the pamphlets were not enough to turn me into a militant Trotskyist, though his ideas are becoming increasingly attractive to me today. Looking back, I’m guessing that the man was a member of the Communist Party in Kerala. Judging by his language and vocabulary, he was obviously well educated and very well read. However, he approached me with an instinctive curiosity – getting a first-hand idea of what life for a lowly call centre employee in Bangalore was like. Obviously incensed by what he heard, he put forward the Communist proposition, which made sense to me – working for an American company that was completely lacking a conscience.

Now, this interaction didn’t make me a Communist, because in the years ahead, I developed a close friendship with a Russian Businessman who was a policeman during the Soviet era. I remember the joy with which he would eat apples while in India – he told me that growing up in Soviet Russia, apples were a rare treat in his town, despite the temperate reaches of Russia being a major apple cultivation zone. Each time we met, he was wistful while talking about his hometown, but after our first bottle of Stolichnaya was done, he would enter a dark place – confronting the corruption, torture, and murder that he had witnessed during his tenure at the Militsiya and at the Soviet Politburo. 

That conversation on the train has stayed with me, and I feel that it’s the correct way people should communicate their political views. Now this man could have started out being judgemental, like some of the other commies in my life, calling me out for blindly serving capitalist interests in return for the crumbs that fall from the table – however, that gentleman heard me out, and was truly indignant at the way that call centre employees were being treated. Somewhere along the line, we lost the ability to have honest and respectful conversations about profoundly important subjects that relate to our well-being as organisms, individuals, families, and societies. 

The way I see it, there are political systems – like Capitalism and Monarchy, that value accumulation of resources and power. While these may be inherently contrary to universal human dignity, they do afford mobility and opportunity to those with drive and ability – history is dotted with rags to riches millionaires, and kings or generals who started as slaves. However, with gatekeeping, cartelization, and discriminatory access to capital or opportunity, even these systems become corrupt and unsustainable. Other systems like Socialism and Communism strive for the equitable distribution of income and resources, but these too, like my Moscovite friend (and poor Trotsky) discovered, rapidly collapse under men’s greed and lust for power. 

Perhaps society today is the way it is, because these two types of political systems exist, and the morally and intellectually corrupt within them negotiate an obscene centrist compromise amongst themselves. In countries like the USSR and USA, where one political camp has obliterated the other, the morally and intellectually corrupt stray far from the system’s ideals and principles, and build an unsustainable and hideous caricature of a society that needs their corrupt brokering of influence and privilege to stay together.

I wish we could talk about Politics like that man on the train. I wish we could listen to each other without judgement, and say – hey your situation looks to me like a mess – this is what the revolution: Capitalism, AI, Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, or Laphroaigism can offer you. Oh, and by the way – check out this reading. 

But unlike in Trotsky’s case, it should be the morally and intellectually dishonest knaves that get knocked on the skull with an axe.