Kolkata ki Cabs

I am sure a lot many of us must have heard of the song “XL ki kudiyan…” Well the other day I was traveling to office in cab and I saw a bumper sticker in one of the cabs saying “Kolkata ki Cabs” and I thought to myself… “That’s saying something”.

Those who have been to Kolkata would know what I am talking about. On any road, station, office or any other place; the yellow cabs significantly outnumber the people standing in the queue. With that being the case, one might think that there would not be any commuting problem with such a significant number of cabs available on the road. But they couldn’t be more wrong about this assumption. As it turns out, the cabbies here have hailed from yet another planet (readers may remember that to an outsider Kolkata is another planet from yet another universe. More details at earlier post at http://aashishsood.blogspot.com/2009/09/decaying-city.html). They do not want to go anywhere, irrespective of the destination you may name, the price you may offer or the threats you may throw at them. They would rather sit in the cab on the curbside but would not do an honest days work.

Furthermore, for those of the cabbies that do agree to take you to your destination, you have to be very very cautious. We have had several instances in the beginning where we were taken in a roundabout way for our destination so that the trip, which should have taken around 15-20 minutes, ended up as an hour and a half journey. Yet another amazing thing about these creatures is their amazing sense of driving. I could not have imagined how a person could drive on the tram tracks or the continuous honking of horns despite being stuck in a long jam or ability to drive on the footpath or the art of scaring the shit out of the passengers and walkers alike. But I was given this divine chance to see all of these and appreciate how simple and good my life was before KP (Kolkata Posting) era. But that’s not all folks. Despite the fact that they overcharge you for cab, despite the fact that they take you through longer routes, despite the fact that they drive like madmen on the streets; we also observed that more often than not, their meters are tempered to go at a faster rate.

But still the cabs are the most popular way of travel in the city we know as Kolkata. I wonder why?

Kolkata is dead. Long live Kolkata.

A decaying City

My first impression when I got off at Howrah station was “God! There are so many damn people here”. The image that I developed of Kolkata at that time got progressively worse. As I left the station to hail a cab, I saw along line of cabs standing outside the station and an even longer line or people queuing for these cabs. The moment I saw the cabs, I thought that I had time traveled back to the sixties with only ambassadors in sight as far away as I could see. Or even that perhaps I have stepped into a place which is filled with inhabitants from a different planet. As it turns out, after my later interactions with people and observing their cultural habits, I was right. It is indeed a new planet.

My subsequent foray into the city did nothing to dispel this notion of mine. The city was filled with people, people crossing the road, people standing on the traffic junctions, people chewing beetle leaves and spitting on the road, people in lungi and baniyan, people without lungi and baniyan and so on and so forth. The roads were lined with Victorian architecture, grand buildings from the British era and other miscellaneous decrepit structures. It was like the entire Kolkata is Chandni Chowk (The original one from Delhi) all over. The first thing to strike my mind was that Kolkata is like a woman who must have been good looking in her prime but has now let herself go.

The one overpowering feeling that I got while traveling through Kolkata was that it is now a decaying city. True that the city hasn’t lost all of its earlier glory, true that it may have a rich culture. But it also true that there is little, if any, growth in the city. Most of the parts of the city are now stagnant. Filled with the human life forms thronging together, it is somehow going through the daily motions but the disease seems have to have set in. the symptoms are there for all to see, people just ignore them. I don’t know if it would ten years or twenty before the city finally given in to the forces and let the collapse settle in. And I know this, I wouldn’t want to be there when that happens.