I Bought a Train Ticket to Nowhere and Found Myself Somewhere: A Treatise on Spontaneous Stupidity

What’s the most spontaneous thing you’ve ever done?

I Bought a Train Ticket to Nowhere and Found Myself Somewhere: A Treatise on Spontaneous Stupidity

Let’s be honest. Most of my life has been meticulously planned. I make lists for my lists. I check the weather three days before I need to dry my socks. Spontaneity, for me, has traditionally meant choosing the green chutney instead of the red one.

So, the most spontaneous thing I have ever done deserves some context.

It was a perfectly ordinary Tuesday in November. 3:47 PM. I was at the railway station to see off a colleague. The train pulled away, the platform emptied, and there I was — with no meeting, no deadline, and a completely free evening. A dangerous combination.

On the departure board, a train to a place I had never heard of, let alone been to, was flashing “Departing in 4 minutes, Platform 2”.

I looked at my sensible shoes. My sensible shoes looked back at me. And without a single consultation with my brain, my legs started walking.

I bought a ticket. Not a return. Just a one-way ticket to utter randomness.

Philosophers will tell you that freedom is an illusion. That we are slaves to habit, to consequence, to our calendar invites. They are probably right. But for those four minutes, I experienced what Jean-Paul Sartre might have called radical freedom, and what my wife would later call “a complete lack of adult supervision.”

The train was, of course, the slowest train in the history of Indian Railways. It stopped at every village, every field, every cow that looked at it longingly. I had no bag, no toothbrush, no plan. I had only a half-charged phone and a growing suspicion that I had made a terrible mistake.

And that was precisely the point.

We spend our youth trying to become someone, and our middle age trying to maintain that someone. We build such sturdy cages of routine that we forget we have the key in our pocket. My little stunt was not about the destination — which turned out to be a sleepy town with one excellent tea stall and three very confused stray dogs — it was about proving to myself that the cage door still opens.

I sat at that tea stall for two hours. I watched a man argue passionately with his goat. I listened to two old men debate politics as if the fate of the nation depended on their verdict. No one knew me. No one needed anything from me. I was, for the first time in decades, not “useful.” I was just… present.

The hilarious part? The entire grand adventure cost me Rs. 85 and a mild panic attack when I realised the last train back was at 9 PM. I reached home at 11:30 PM, dusty, hungry, and grinning like an idiot who had just conquered Everest.

My family thought I had been kidnapped.

When asked where I had been, I could not give a satisfactory answer. How do you explain that you needed to get lost on purpose?

Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. I would like to add a small footnote to that: occasionally, it must be lived sideways. With no map. On a Tuesday.

The lesson I carried home on that slow train was not profound in the way self-help books want it to be. I did not find my life’s purpose in that unknown town. I found a very good samosa.

But I did learn this: Spontaneity is not about being reckless. It is about reminding your soul that it is still allowed to play truant. We are so terrified of wasting time that we never waste it beautifully.

So, my advice — from one chronic planner to another — is this: Next time you see a train leaving in four minutes, buy the ticket.

Even if you just come back. You will return a slightly different person. Slightly dustier. And with a far better story to tell than “I checked my emails.”