A travel across the capital city in an auto-rickshaw or a
DTC bus always seems like lambasting my own wit for choosing the roads rather
than the Japanese and Korean funded metro rail. The traffic moves at a snail’s
pace across the busy junctions, and the commuters keep on abusing the system
and the slow rate of Indian progress story, often confined within the
air-conditioned cars. While an onlooker like me seriously question the system
of capitalism that begets every sort of crisis in the lives of the people,
while the problems with the streets are commonly shared by the rich and the
poor alike, especially when there is a long stranded traffic on a busy highway.
Capitalism hates to wait, for it, each moment means an opportunity to earn
money; just like in an insurance company it will be inevitable that a nosy and
I-know-everything kind of a sales manager will tell the executive that every
call is a ‘sales opportunity’. Capitalism has worked on the same logic while it
hates to wait for anything; it loves to make people wait, even for centuries.
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| Chaos at Delhi |
So traffic jam, if seen from a capitalist perspective, is
caused by the ‘bloody poor people’ the ‘parasites’ as some of our beloved
ultra-fanatic devotee of Modi would like to call them. The situation is more
flummoxing than what it appears to be in its present avatar. First of all, the
poor men and women, whom those on fast wheels consider pests infesting ‘their
own’ cities and streets, are not people who came flocking to the cities like
Delhi and Mumbai on their own seeking fun and employment; most of them are
people who are evicted from their homeland, their villages and land by a
development agenda, which these people in the air-conditioned cars
consider India’s highway to economic prosperity. Secondly, these people,
despite all the hardships of their lives, are not begging, but labouring hard
to feed themselves and their dependants. Thirdly, the rich, the super-rich, and
the wanna-be-rich type people are the major cause of roadblocks in a city like
Delhi. Don’t believe me? Well, then sit close to a bus stand in any busy
junction on any given business day and see how many people are riding their
cars all alone to work, for every one person, four wheels and litres of fossil
fuel are on the burning trail. Not one, tens or hundreds, but thousands of them
are roving across the boulevards of the power city of India, their cars, their
symbol of status, class and power is choking the city roads, forget the
pollution and its side effects on the future generations.
Yes, a better public transport system, a greener orientation
towards transport could have saved the city and its life for the next couple of
decades from falling prey to the most chronic and critical illness. However, it
is our rich and the mighty, who would never ride a bicycle to work or even
consider taking a ride in a bus or metro rail an act of self-humiliation,
because, for them, car symbolises their glory and achievements. After all tall
talks about Odd-Even scheme, curtailing private cars on the streets, improving
private transport, the Chief Minister of Delhi and his entire cabinet has
reverted back to the old temple of status quo and have surreptitiously turned
the issues of pollution – taboos . So, like other Indian metro cities, Delhi
too keeps on symbolising the rule of the rich and super rich. Another city
where a poor rickshaw puller, whose cart neither emits smoke nor consumes
fossil fuel, is abused for doing what he does, rickshaw pulling; a cyclist is
abused for riding on a street the lads of rich dads call their own. All these
when a car or a motorbike keeps on violating traffic laws, rash drives,
threatens the right of the pedestrians and other commuters on the road! When
this is the shape of the mindset of a middle-class block in the most corrupt
city in the country, I wonder what better can be there for these people, who
are themselves a parasite class now vis a vis the people of the entire
country.
