India: We're on Strike, and the Chicken Burger is Not Available

Alicia here. After dodging the touts at the rail station, and finally, FINALLY procuring a rail ticket to New Jalpaiguri from Delhi, we this morning disembarked from a stunningly comfortable first class-AC, 26 hour train ride and caught a share jeep up the foothills of the Himalayas to cool, clean, refreshing Darjeeling in the Commie hills of West Bengal. What a relief.
A couple of funny things happened last night on the train. First, there was a huge awesome lightning storm happening for miles over the flatlands out the train window. It lit up the sky somethin' fierce in the middle of the night. I sat up to watch streaks of jagged electricity strobing between clouds and clouds and between clouds and ground. I asked Dan what would happen if the train was struck by lightning, and he said nothing would because the train is grounded, so that set my mind at ease. But, then he said he was just kidding and not to touch the metal frame around the window, so after that I didn't know what to think. The second interesting thing that happened was that I was woken up by a lot of shouting and banging out in the hallway. (In a first class train car, you have 5 "coupes" or "rooms" housing travellers, and a hallway running the length of them). I figured the people next door were just rowdy, as well as rude, and eventually fell back to sleep with the vague perception that the train was stopping. The next day, Dan told me that they threw somebody off the train. In the middle of the night during a bathroom run, he told me there was some guy and a kid with all their luggage next to the train car door talking to some authority figure, and none of them looked too happy. Que misterioso, no? I do wonder what offense could be committed in the middle of the night to have you thrown off the train. None of our attendants or caterers spoke a lick of English, so I couldn't glean much about anything from them.
Before getting on the train, we spent about 22 hours on a bus tour of important sites in and around Agra, including the Taj. I'm not usually impressed by important sites, and particularly large or fancy buildings, but this one really lived up to all the hype. Exceeded it, even. I was amazed to find that truthfully, there are some things that the best photography can't capture - and the sheer size and scale of the Taj Mahal, the intricacy of every tile on that massive structure, the symmetry, the hollow ghostly singsong sound of the inner mausoleum winds, its position reigning over the bend of a still and glassy river - is one of those things.
We spent most of our time chatting up an American kid from Duke who had been conducting malaria research in Orissa for 2.5 months and an older New Yorker who couldn't help but reveal his inner-communist after coming face to face with the millions of destitute and poverty-stricken in this country. I hope I still have things to learn when I'm that old. Lord knows I seem to know less every day. After our long discussion about economics, wealth, fairness, poverty, the human condition, etc etc, our day today consisted of checking into an absolutely fabulous hotel and splurging on the really sweet room for an extra $7 a night. What does it all mean?!