[Reader-list] For Zainab: Bus to Metro

[Shivam Vij]

Dear Zainab,

Have been following your research postings. I have
been keenly observing Delhi's transition from bus to
metro rail, and every time I hear the word Metro, i
get an adrenaline rush! I have travelled on the Delhi
Metro four or five times only as an observer, without
the need to travel. To some extent I must accept that
the urge to explore the metro was borne out of being
an immigrant: a joke in India Today said that a true
Delhite is one who is proud of the Metro but has never
travelled on it. 

As someone who had live an insular life in lazy
Lucknow for 19 years, I observed public transport in
Delhi from the very outset. The 'outset' was exactly a
year ago, June 2003, when I was exploring Delhi for
the first time in order to get admission in DU at the
undergrad level. I have been observing, particularly,
the bus system. I have found public transport in Delhi
more efficient and convenient in Delhi than in Lucknow
despite - or because of? - Delhi being a much larger
city. 

In buses in Delhi I have observed the class strata of
people who travel on them, and have seen their lives
from a tangent. Sometimes a bus gets so crowded that
there's no breathing space, bodies hug each other, and
at such times I have seen people trying, successfully
and unsuccessfully, to touch and fondle people's
genitals. This is on both homo- as well as
heterosexual levels. Women are mostly at the receiving
end, but in one case a girl was taking the initiative.


I once met a guy who turned out to be the official
kabariwallah of the India Habitat Centre!

Because people are so closely thrust to one another,
they readily mix with strangers, as in trains. (This
is one of the many things the Metro is going to change
as far as travelling culture is concerned.) My
experience with such strangers has been rather weird.
One ageing man insisted I tell him my name. And then
what do I do, where do I study, what do I study, which
is my native city. I tried to avoid him, I was not
interested in him. But my coldness was not enough to
put him off. I wondered why he was not interested in
my classmate-friend, who was also travelling with me.
We were returning to north campus from Kamani
auditorium. I made two mistakes: 1) I told him I'm
from Lucknow and 2) I felt guilty of being too rude
and so asked him in formality what was his name. I
don't remember the name now, but I remember everything
else about him. He was a poor Anglo-Indian. Much to
his delight he was also from Lucknow, and started
asking me if such-and-such person was still around in
either of the two Christian schools I went to in
Lucknow. He started telling me the virtues of
missionary education: St. Columbus' Delhi is a school
as fine, he said, as La Martiniere or St. Francis' in
Lucknow; and being in St. Stephen's, Shivam, you must
have seen yourself how... And then he changed the
topic to the story of his life: I married a Dalit. I
am not casteist. I hate casteism, I married off my
daughter to a guy who earns more than me, and so on
and so forth. When I got down he shouted out of the
window: When you go to Lucknow ask Trevor Savaille at
Mart if he still remembers me!

In July I met a college student who asked me about
myself and behaved stiffly, to impress upon me that i
was a fachcha, he was a senior in another DU college,
and beta, this was ragging time. In August I met a
'senior' who was bowled over at just knowing which
college I was in. 

The average Indian is very eager about defining him or
herself: caste, community, city, school/college, job,
locality... these are all parameters, one by one, of
one's station in life, and so obsessed are people with
their station in life and their upward mobility or the
lack of it, that they spell it out in five minutes to
perfect strangers. 

Then the noise of the traffic, the hum of the city,
and most importantly the screams of the bus conductor
are important to the bus culture of Delhi. The way
conductors shout the names of bus stops like is very
admirable. It's an art I've been trying to practise
for some time now. I once asked a bus conductor what
he meant by Bartaniya, and he said it was a place. So
even though I did not have to go to Bartaniya, I
decided to take a ticket till there. The name sounded
as exotic as Timbucktu. And what did Bartaniya turn
out to be? A bus stop just outside the Britannia
Industries office. Or is it a factory? A strong smell
of Glucose biscuits hangs in the air there, as though
Parle G biscuits were manufactured inside.

All this is being changed by the Metro. A public
announcement system has replaced the conductor. "Dilli
Metro mein aapka swagat hain. Welcome to Delhi Metro."
The Metro is air-conditioned hence closed. You won't
smell the city anymore. The Metro is much faster and
the ambience far, far more upmarket than that of a DTC
or Blue Line bus. Each Metro has a policeman inside
it: there you go about safety. Can a rape take place
inside the Metro? Not at all, the roaming policeman is
a fright even for professional "eve-teasers". The
Metro is a new experience and anyone travelling on it
for the first time doesn't stop gloating about it.
Unless you are used to metros, like my classmate
Paromita who hailed from Durgapur/Kolkata. This is
more advanced, she said, but the Cal metro has
something else about it. The art-work inside...

A classmate who hailed from Bangalore/London scoffed
at my invitation for a joy ride on the Metro. I later
realised she must have travelled on the London tube so
many times. 

Near Shahadara station we looked through the glass
window and were reminded of being in India: a slum.
Prince Charles must have seen the slum when he
travelled on it: or was it removed? But let's not go
into socialist contrasting of the slum with the
multi-crore awesome metro. Because, I realised, even
people from the slum must be using the metro! It was
then cheaper than buses, and is now slightly more
expensive. The transport authorities in Delhi have
stopped running buses in the routes where the metro
has become operational. The Metro stations -
first-timers should go to ISBT - are so slick, so
technology heavy. It's so pleasant to go there, unlike
in buses. The people who give you tickets use
computers and wear ties. What is going to happen to
the bus drivers and conductors and their jobs?

The ticket is a plastic coupon to be returned, and
it's all automated. There are entry and exit doors in
the stations which are electronically operated by the
plastic coupons. And when lower middle class people
take the metro instead of the bus, they negotiate with
technology in ways that even the infamous Chandra Babu
Naidu of Ceberabad couldn't have devised. These are
people obsessed with their station in lives. These are
people who buy a two rupee ticket in the bus when they
have to pay Rs 5: saving rupees three is important for
them because they have to manage the entire month in
1,500 rupees. Often the lack in what may be class,
which comes from their not having access to the
English language. These are people termed as 'Hindi
medium types'. These are people who couldn't have
dreamt of travelling AC in their lives: and now they
are doing it every day to office. These are the people
most likely to be swayed by the India Shining
campaign! I have seen how happy they are to be in the
metro, their station in life raised by one point the
moment they entered the metro station.

The makers of the metro seem to be surprisingly aware
of the important of aesthetics. They're putting up
paintings in the metro stations, the stations are
unbelievable clean. All rules devised by the metro are
being followed. This includes the paranoid order of
banning photography inside the metro: the policeman
confiscates your camera. And once the journey is over
you can't linger on the platform for even a minute. A
policeman waves his lathi and tells you to get out! 

This has become very long but I can go on and on about
what the metro is doing to travel culture in Delhi. At
the same time one cannot but romanticise bus travel no
matter how inconvenient it is. 

In fact I wanted to document this change but needed to
do an extensive project on it. A Sarai fellowship
would have been ideal but being an undergrad I was
ineligible, and so I didn't apply. But I will document
this change soon in some other way... I wish I were a
filmmaker: the change can be documented with all its
complexities ideally in a documentary.

Shivam



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