This Morning

LONDON—I am fairly certain that you can see the entire world here in just your morning commute. Oddly enough, my commute to work every morning is my favorite part of my day.

As for “seeing the entire world”—it’s true. This morning, I sat with observing eyes as Alpine and Bombay Bicycle Club flooded my ears to help me through my daily commute. There is something truly exhilarating about the rush of the morning, of course, besides just the incessant pushing and shoving one witnesses during rush hour.

Just like myself, most people have earphones plugged in each morning. Today, as I sat there, I began to pay particular notice to the people around me:

Next to me stood a seemingly middle-aged woman, hurriedly reading through an LLM handbook, presumably for law school. I took a quick peek over my shoulder, and her extensive book discussed how mental health affected clients and why lawyers should care.

Next to her stood an older Indian woman, on the phone with her husband. She spoke in Hindi, which I am lucky enough to have understood. They were discussing dinner plans and grocery shopping, and she kept telling him that she really loved him.

Across stood an older man, awkwardly looking at me looking at him.

Behind me was the loud, excited chatter of three American tourists who had just sparked up a conversation with a middle-aged British man. They were talking loudly enough that I basically know everything about them. A San Francisco-based mother with two of her children was on vacation and currently en route to King’s Cross from Heathrow, beyond excited to begin her European adventure. The daughter had just graduated high school and was about to attend some unnamed college that the man in question was trying to pry out of her; the son was still in high school. The man talking to them was originally from Chicago but worked in Detroit, and was “in love with San Francisco.” The tourists’ excitement and wonder about the Tube, British pounds, and fish and chips punctuated my otherwise mundane morning. I was exactly that tourist just 10 days ago, and it felt just a little sad that the shine had already worn off.

There stood a boy, probably very close to me in age, reading a George R.R. Martin novel intently, going from page to page at a very impressive speed.

When I finally made it off the overground train to my final 20-minute commute to work on the Tube, a man probably in his late twenties entered with me, dressed in a suit and holding a briefcase; his face had quite a few fresh cuts on it, most definitely from a hasty morning shave gone wrong (which I can more than sympathize with). He downed an energy drink and sighed as he ran to the first empty seat he could find. He looked exhausted—perhaps hungover from Sunday night World Cup festivities.

A schoolgirl got on the Tube a stop before my departure, falling asleep and waking up every 30 seconds or so.

There was a couple holding hands as they held onto a pole. They talked to each other with the biggest smiles on their faces, and the man gently held on to her to make sure she would not fall as she handled her handbag in one hand and a Zara bag in the other.

My new goal? Spark up a conversation with one of these strangers tomorrow.

Akshay Verma ’17, a Crimson arts editor, is an economics concentrator in Currier House.