Every time I go down Tulsi Pipe Road, I inevitably end up cursing my country and all its governments, from municipality to state to Centre. Just to be perfectly fair, I also curse the people. Usually, this starts to happen around half a kilometre before Dadar station, and ends half a kilometre after Dadar station. It is brought about by the traffic jams that bedevil passage through this important arterial road at any time of day. I’ve been observing those jams daily, six days a week, for months now. They are caused due to the chaos at both ends of a flyover that supposedly flies over the chaos around Dadar station. What the flyover actually does is quite different. If I recall correctly, the sociologist Dipankar Gupta, in a memorable phrase, had written years ago that in India, flyovers merely elevate jams to an altitude. This is precisely what happens at Dadar flyover. Now, flyovers work perfectly fine in most countries around the world. Why do they not do their job in India Well, because we are stupid, and don’t know how to plan. So we build flyovers from point A to point B, but forget to do anything to improve point A or point B. Result: Two bottlenecks, one at either end of the flyover, jams at an altitude, a lot of public money wasted, and probably some contractors and officials enriched. A couple of weeks ago, there was a small fire in the area. The fire engines couldn’t get in. Often, ambulances get stuck in the jam. Maybe people die because of the delay, who knows. Things don’t get fixed because there’s always different lobbies and pressure groups. It may be street vendors in Dadar or Linking Road, or the parking mafia that benefits from the absence of modern parking lots. Ours is a country with a massive population of poor people, and cannot provide employment to far too many of its citizens. Thus, it is only fair that they be allowed to make an honest living as vendors. However, ours is also, simultaneously, a rich country, a member of the G20 and an aspirant for a United Nations Security Council seat. We have the means to send satellites into space, but can’t build parking lots and get our roads right. Mumbai was going to become Shanghai years ago, but it has not even become Delhi. If a Mumbaikar who has never been to any other city is dropped into Lutyens’ Delhi, he will probably think he has been transported to a foreign country. The wide roads, neat gardens, and gracious bungalows would be too much of a shock for him. You might say that if Delhi can do it, so can Mumbai, but this is where I start cursing some typical Indian attitudes. Lutyen’s Delhi was built by British architect Edwin Lutyens during the British Raj. It is neat and organised. The only other planned city in India, Chandigarh, was built by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. As Indians, we have only built chaos and corruption. What is India’s contribution to the world in science, arts, literature, architecture, sports, anything, since 1947 Precious little. Yes we do have a lot of people trying to feel proud about what their supposed ancestors did 500 or 1,500 years ago. I say “supposed ancestors” because only a few royal families can accurately trace their ancestries beyond five generations. Even granting that the ancestors may indeed have achieved sterling feats, what are the proud descendants good at doing Waving flags Today, we have not a single university in the top 200 in the world. We just have quantity without quality in everything. If we dream of making things better for ourselves and our country, we must ask ourselves what we are doing to make things better. Getting defensive, making excuses, and harking back to idealised pasts are sure ways of ensuring that nothing will ever improve in India.
