Indiana, and other stories.

I have spent the last few minutes trying to come up with a word which I am pretty sure doesn’t exist, at least not in English. I am looking for a word which is like the word “Americana” except for India instead of America. The best I have been able to come up with so far is “Indiana,” but I think that might already mean something else. No matter. I am undaunted. I have come across a fun bit of trivia about India: a little morsel of Indiana which I found absolutely incredible.

It concerns the Indian railroad system. These numbers are vague, but I am quite sure they are accurate. I am sure a few minutes of research could produce more exact figures, but I liked the way this information was conveyed to me so I will pass it on to you unaltered.

A) If you were to pull up all the railroad tracks in India and lay them along the equator in one long single track, there would be enough of it to go around the world one-and-a-half times!
B) The railway system is all government-owned. The number of people employed by the government to run the railroad system is larger than the number of people in the US Military.

A couple of things immediately sprang to mind when I heard these numbers.
The first was a reaffirmation of my belief that there has never been, in the history of the world, a logistical enterprise to equal the British Empire. God only knows what horrible methods they used on the Indian population to construct this colossal web of railways, but there is a sort of morbid magnificence to the brutal efficiency of the world’s first capitalist empire.
The second was a sudden realization of the incredible weight of the Indian government bureaucracy. If they have that many people working for the railroad alone, how large must the government payroll be if you include the military and all the ministries? It must be gigantic.

In a related story*, it seems that Google has decided to change its name from Google to Topeka.


* I use the term "related" somewhat loosely. These two stories are related geographically because Indiana and Kansas are both corn-spangled Midwestern states, and temporally because I happened to become aware of them both within roughly the same time period.

In a totally unrelated story, I am very excited about this weekend. Twitter confirms.