Bullet Train Explosion - Movie Review

Just finished watching Bullet Train Explosion and wanted to share that this was a movie that I enjoyed from the first frame to the last because it really spoke to the engineer in me. The opening shot of the movie is in a Shinkansen rolling stock yard and the first person you see in an engineer in a hard hat. This is the crew of the train that will be taking you on an exhilrating journey through Japanese society and the engineer ethos.

There are a few people in the world who get absolutely excited in the presence of massive engineering. But I have learned that not everyone is like this. If you’re not like this then my apologies, but do still watch this movie as it has something for everyone.

Ostensibly, the movie is Speed on a Bullet Train as the train will explode if its speed drops below 100 kmph, but that’s where the similarity ends. While Speed is an American individualist movie, this one is about a collectivist spirit — of the sort that can only arise in the presence of something larger than oneself, in this case the awe-inspiring Shinkansen train network of Japan. It is quite clear from the start that everyone involved in the work of running their trains take their jobs very seriously.

You get to see the famous point-and-call technique in action which has contributed to a zero fatality rate on the network inspite of running a train every three minutes at peak hour for 60 years. You get to see the control room which has since its inception seen the addition of more and more advanced technology but at its heart is still the massive wall showing the operational status of all the trains.

And in one of the early scenes a rookie conductor jokes about the mission of all conductors — to get every passenger safely to their destination — and gets instantly rebuked by his senior. Do not take this lightly, he says. Yes, running the Shinkansen service is about the trains but we only run the trains to get people to their destination safely and on time.

The rest of the movie is a total treat for engineers and especially high speed rail buffs. Also, it’s a competent thriller in its own right.

And it got me to thinking of our country, India. Unlike Japan, we are a highly heterogenous country and the only thing that can be bigger than people’s caste, creed or religion is a Nation. The Indian Republic.

The founding fathers of our country knew this. You can say all you want about Nehru’s economic failings but he had a country to cohere and the only institution that had the resources and the right vibe to build a nation was the State with its massive engineering works where a Tamilian could work alongside a Bihari to build the Bhakra Nangal Dam in Punjab or for a Muslim to work with a Hindu sending rockets to space.

The great State-run enterprises were not just there to do the work of building infrastructure but also to build cohesive working relationships between all the various peoples of our land. Without this national unity progress will be slow if it happens at all. It should be the governments top priority - to build a national consciousness that is bigger than religion. And what we get instead is this. If we start to divide into us and them, there is no end to the divisions we can create in this land, and each and every one of them is a historical division persisting since millenia. Go look up the difference between the Pandes and Pandeys and you will know.

And I think in general, given the state of our development, that Indian engineers have a large role to play in nation building. If it were up to me, I’d massively expand not the Agniveer scheme but the Army Engineering Corps. Offer a short service commission to anyone smart enough to pass the exam in their third year of engineering. Come to the army, finish your degree under this system, serve the country for five years, get an honorary rank of Major and go into civil life with connections across the length and breadth of the country and build things with the national spirit that we need in our infrastructure now.

And engineers are an essential foil against corruption and misgovernance as they are educated and can organise under bodies like The Institution of Engineers in order to ensure their professional standards even in government work, stand up to the termite-infestation of corruption.

So yeah, watching a Japanese thriller can lead to so many thoughts.