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No bridge over troubled waters

On a normal day, it should take me 90 minutes to reach home from my place of work in Bombay. The break-up is thus: 10 minutes from office to railway station, one hour train journey, five minutes to hunt for an autorickshaw after alighting, and 15 minutes to reach my doorstep after that.

On Monday night, however, I found to my horror that the autorickshaw took 20 minutes to clear what must be 30 feet of road to the junction. It was a harrowing time, as the narrow road was chockablock with vehicles of all kinds and sizes, spewing smoke and emitting noise to make our world so much a worse place to live in.

I am sure that this was by no means a unique experience. Every Bombayite living in the suburbs and beyond, referred to as tadipaar log by the gentry, must be going through a similar experience, day in and day out, as local areas creak under the weight of an exploding, increasingly affluent population. Through the noisy arguments of drivers on Monday night, I recollected that this was by now a routine phenomenon, and that every morning, I spend at least 15 minutes at the junction outside the railway station as vehicles indulge in internecine warfare to clear a swathe across the macadam.

For 20 minutes on Monday night, I also thought that though the problem was worsening day by harrowing day, it does not need Galileo's genius to arrive at a solution. Most suburban railway stations, built a generation ago, have parallel roads. Surely it cannot be all that difficult to make each one-way, at least during peak hours, rather than run both as two-way streets and choke them up? Surely it cannot be all that difficult to ban jaywalking and hawking on the main arteries outside the stations at least, two prime reasons for the congestion one experiences? A solution was missing only due to lack of mental application, and the latter was because in the eyes of those who matter, this problem did not matter. Not yet.

One does not need a Ph D in the ways of the mind to realise that the hours spent at traffic snarls lead to tension and high BP, the number of silly fights that break out in the logjam should be pointer enough. Yet, those in positions of authority are the last to even know that such a problem exists.

Examples of this apathy, isolation from reality, are galore. For instance, the horrific travelling conditions prevailing in Bombay's suburban rail system are the stuff that legends are made of. Compounding the misery inside trains during peak hours used to be the fact that the railway administration and the government did not think it fit to replace the old-fashioned level crossings with over-bridges. The Bombay commuter, aware that the city suburban section rakes in moolah by the millions for Indian Railways, which is offset against the losses suffered by the suburban railway network in other parts of the country, grumbled and grumbled. No one had their ear to the ground, and almost four years ago the commuters went on a rampage, setting fire to railway stations and the like, after which the government sat up and took notice.

That, of course, was in a different regime, and the Bharatiya Janata Party, ever ready for such an opportunity, milked the grievance dry, and projected itself as the party with an automatic redressal mechanism. Which is why, on Monday night, I was surprised that neither it, nor its partner in power, the Shiv Sena, were even remotely aware of the mounting anger among the ordinary people of Bombay at the slow collapse in civic services.

After all, how much more can the residents of my neighbourhood expect? Their local corporator, legislator, and the member of Parliament are all from the same political party/alliance, so there can be no passing the buck on to a higher authority. Apart from these elected representatives, the political parties concerned have a flourishing office in the region. So the question that simply refuses to die in my mind is, how come politicians refuse to see the public's disenchantment with them till it blows up in their face?

The BJP, now, is a prime example of this 'power blinds, absolute power blinds absolutely' syndrome. Everybody knew six months ago that the prices in the marketplace were galloping out of the people's reach. Presumably, even if our politicians don't shop personally, given the security risk all of them as a class face, somebody from their household must surely be going out to buy provisions, somebody must be using public transport... And given that homo sapiens as a species are compulsive talkers, that somebody should be coming back and informing the family about the experiences outside.

Yet, it took the BJP, which portrayed itself as a people-friendly party before it came to power, an adverse election result to realise that the people were upset with its policies. Today the party and the government are fighting over who is to blame for ground-level information not reaching the powers that be.

In the ultimate analysis, it seems to me that our politicians, of all hues, have lost touch with reality, have divorced themselves from the churning masses, of which they were once part, barricading themselves behind barbed wire and stenguns. The people's expectations from those they elect are nothing high-falutin' -- after all, how can you expect undergraduates and school dropouts, the staple from which our political leadership comes from, to understand anything finer as, say, Keynesian economics?

The voter has time and again shown that all he wants is a quiet, peaceful life, one that subjects him to no extra hardship. He does not want a luxurious lifestyle, just a simple one, where taps produce water, the communication system works, the public transport keeps to its schedule, and the marketplace does not rip into his pocket. After all, he is not asking for a free lunch of those who are gorging themselves on the public weal.

Yet, our political parties, instead of serving as the link between those that confer on them the power to ameliorate mundane existence and the government elected to office to serve, have failed as a whole to fulfil this simple task. Serving the people, to them, is a motto guaranteed to pilot them into positions of power, after which their energies are geared towards retaining that power. The people, the voter, thus ends up as the sucker, time after time, even though experience, one would have thought, should have made him wise.

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Saisuresh Sivaswamy