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Direction: Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

Is Calcutta's Howrah the only railway station in the world that stocks Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection' in a platform bookshop? It looks pirated, which is another intellectual plus. Piracy is a tribute to popularity. Darwin is amidst honourable fellow pirates, an inch askance of 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' and within teardrop distance of 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles', novels from the weeping pen of the Victorian romantic, Thomas Hardy. Is the purchase manager of A.H. Wheeler, the venerable platform bookstore chain, still emotionally enthralled by an age when English literature was an honourable degree? Unlikely. He would not survive if books sat placidly on shelves. Books must move.

Fellow Victorian Rudyard Kipling, trumpet and bard of the Empire, sits nearby, smiling with justified pride through the thick flurry of his moustache. The British Raj has not been in vain after all. Charles Dickens is a shelf below. In the vicinity of this elite roam the myriad children of American and Indian English: the fiction of Ken Follett, Dan Brown,

Mario Puzo, Chetan Bhagat, Amish Tripathi, et al. The popular fixation with murder, love and religion is the true eternal triangle.

Any Indian railway station is heartland of the middle class. Howrah station, the alpha and omega of countless middle-class journeys, belongs to Bengalis who know the value of Shakespeare's heroes and the worth of Mario Puzo's villains. Salute!

Howrah station remains the jigsaw puzzle of mess and manicure that it ever was. A thousand whispers coalesce into a middling roar. Dust rises every where and disappears into nowhere. This is how it was in the Sixties, and this is how it remains in the 21st century. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Nostalgia is comforting. But deja vu is another matter.

My train to Ranchi arrives a comfortable 30 minutes before departure, and leaves on time. After the obligatory small talk with fellow passengers, I am asleep within three pages of my new purchase from platform.

'Howrah station, the alpha and omega of countless middle-class journeys...' Why the author thinks so?

A)  Because it belongs to Bengalis

B)  Because Howrah is the only railway station in the world that stocks Charles Darwin's masterpiece in a platform bookshop

C)  Because middle class of India mostly travel by train

D)  Because Howrah station is the beginning and the end point of countless journeys

E)  None of these