Yet another rainy season, yet another day of water logged roads. It amazes me how easily we accept the signs of our very own mediocrity. Oh it is easy to quote the growth rates to me…yeah yeah yeah, the industry is growing at 8%, but for a country that is growing so fast, the smallest hint of the blessed rain and people don’t have dry shoes when they reach their work places. Hats off to the public that still can drive the 8% GDP, but why cant we drive the very change in our infrastructure?
I know things take time, I know it needs investment, I know such things don’t happen in a snap. But the fact is for the last 5-7 years, every summer we expect to see the same things in the papers. The only thing that has changed is that the situation worsens every year and the media now makes a bigger hoopla about it. But tell me, has anything happened to change the power situation in Delhi? I know the NCR city where I lived in, it went from bad to worse. Not only did we have just 4-5 hrs of power in a day in summers, the supply in winters also went down to sometimes less than 10 hours a day. Is that what we call making a change?
And what of the rainy season? As I opened the HT a few days back, I was greeted with pictures of water logged roads, of stranded bikes and cars, of children dancing in the filthy water, of people half drowned as they make their way to work. As I was almost about to pass the photographs without paying them much attention, it struck me that too many people do that already. It happens every year, every damn year and we are so used to it by now and so set in the ways of ‘oh nothing is going to change’ that we don’t even care. And if we don’t care, of course THEY would never care. Did anyone ever learn anything from Mumbai flooding? Doesn’t seem like it to me. In fact it seems like we take some kind of a perverse pride in being the pig headed, blindly led people that we are. So much more fun to walk in our own wastes thanks to sewer mixing with rainwater and proclaiming, ‘oh new Orleans?? Why we at Mumbai did so much better with our floods…’ happily ignoring that while one was the impact of a hurricane the other was a rain lashes city which would not have had its err claim to fame had things been better managed (my retort to that asinine email I was forwarded a thousand times by patriotic people, the email which compares devastation of Katrina to flooding in Mumbai…pah).
Oh and it is not just our roads flooding, apparently come monsoon and the roof of the IGIA (The Indira Gandhi INTERNATIONAL airport leaks as well!). Doesn’t that say something about us? Crumbling infrastructure? Of course! Doesn’t that say something about made in India? A couple decades and they go bam! In a way I guess it’s good, I mean it is sort of like that forewarned thing, you know…the leaky roof at the airport should warn the tourist about how leaky the state of affairs in the country is anyways, so then they cant complain when they get robbed, cheated, murder or raped by the friendly tourist guide or the cab wallah’s and all.
The thing to think about is…this is just about the capital. Shouldn’t this place at least keep an illusion of belonging to one of the fastest growing economies of the world? And I am talking of the roads beyond Rashtrapati Bhavan! You can imagine if this is how horrid life in the capital is, how it must suck to be stuck in parts as you move away from it. I would say I can’t even imagine it, but then I saw it on CNN a few days back when they covered floods in ‘Behar’. Of course years upon years of floods in Bihar, Orissa and U.P. Haven’t taught us a lesson, so when they occur every year we go ‘tch tch, it must be so hard to live in those areas, bechare log’. And the politicians go “Hum dekh rahe the, hum dekh rahe hain, and hum dekhte rahainge…’ and then to the journalist ‘arre aap photu lejiye na, hum yahan aaya hun junta ko pata hona chahiye na.’
So why is it that every time ‘they’ want something from us they can easily make us dance to that age old tune of ‘hindu and muslim’ and ‘pakistan, kashmir’ or these days a newer tune of ‘SC ST and the rest of you’? Why is it that no one is ever held accountable for their responsibility to make our lives livable? Why is it that no one ever had to answer for the same misery happening every year? And why is it that we have become so passive, why is it that we don’t care?
I know it is easy for me to sit here and preach, and I was for a moment contemplating trashing this little piece. I long ago resigned myself to the same mediocrity that everyone else is embracing, instead accepting the sad fact that if I want to better my own life, I might as well move to greener pastures. So call me a selfish if you like, but do that only if you can do something to change the scene from what it is and not trudge along like brainless bovine led in herds.
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