With every Rajdhani ticket there ought to be a statutory warning that people who expect decent food served in a half-decent fashion should immediately cancel their tickets and take some other train. At least in other trains you are well prepared with your own stock of food, sheets etc. With every trip on the Rajdhani the standards seem to plumb new lows.

This time, the most amusing instance on the journey from Delhi to Trivandrum was tea trays lined with half a paper napkin and soup served with one soup stick broken into two and placed solemnly alongside the cup of soup on the tray. Talk of recession and cost cutting! By lunch time the paper napkin disappeared altogether. By dinner it made a reluctant appearance. This hide-and-seek napkin game was a feature on the return journey too.

Now let’s get to the soups. Or, should that be soup because they all had one soul-- water drained from the cooked rice, possibly with some corn flour too and other subtle variations. A dash of pepper, salt and a hint of butter made it butter soup. Never heard of that one! Later, the same rice water with bits of carrot floating and you have before you vegetable soup. And tomato soup? Seemed suspiciously like more rice water with tomato flavouring and red colour.

As for the food, I must confess I can only talk of the vegetarian fare, as I, a hard core carnivore, did not dare opt for non-vegetarian meals. Too many horror stories about what creature the meat might actually be sourced from made me chicken out of the non-veg option. However, one must note the caterer’s evident concern for the passengers’ health. All food was low salt, low spice and uniformly bland. Paneer in various indistinguishable gravies was standard fare with a few exceptions.

One cannot sign off without talking of the sheets and blankets so thoughtfully provided on board. At least seemingly washed and clean on the onward journey. And definitely used and unclean on the journey back to Delhi. The silver lining was the incredibly polite staff, who seemed pretty helpless about the quality of everything else.

Gone are the days when a Rajdhani journey was as much about food as the speed of travel in clean air conditioned comfort. Maybe, they ought to offer a discount to passengers who would make the oh-so-difficult promise not to touch any of the delectable fare they serve on the train and bring their own sheets and blankets. Could I please be the first to avail of that discount?