Potholing could become an Olympic sport!

(bdnews24.com, August 7, 2011)

I was out yesterday and most of the time, trying to navigate the roads of my city, Mumbai. It was not just a time-consuming effort, given the traffic bogging up every street, but also a rather painful one. This, because at every six or so paces or so the car dipped in and out of a pothole, often unexpected, that bane of the Mumbai municipality’s infrastructural department.

There were, of course, alternatives to sitting in a comfortable automobile doing little more than checking text messages or talking gently to the driver and my co-passenger. I could have started a small business in milkshakes, adding flavour to milk and letting it froth happily in the spin, whirl and rattle of the road against the wheels. I could have started a whole range of milk products, really, churning butter in the boot, fluffing up espresso in the front seat and making cheese under the hood. But the fallout of all my mad entrepreneurial thoughts? And that long bumpy trip in the car: a severe backache, a cricked neck, stiff legs and a whacking great headache.

The main topic of discussion these days in any home from almost any socio-economic stratum is the state of the city and its various essential services. In other words, whatever affects the ordinary resident of the megalopolis, from the price of milk to the number of potholes to the collection of garbage to overall cleanliness is up there for hot debate that can include everything from curses to the government in general to vexed noises about the vegetable market that tends to accumulate garbage and thus pests and thus illness.

And along the way there will be many rude words said, many dire predictions made, many what-ifs and opinions aired. Reams of newsprint and hours of airtime will be occupied with the ramifications of the problem, and audits will be done on whether any solutions have been found and, if so, how effective they have been and for how long. But along the way, people seem to forget one simple way into and around the whole issue of civic maintenance, be it road surfaces, garbage heaps or prices of essential commodities.

The ones directly impacted are the users, the customers, but the ones almost directly responsible for the problems are, in fact, the same users, customers.

Consider my horror some years ago, when I started commuting by the local trains – those amazingly efficient (especially considering the load they carry and the conditions they need to function in) metal worms that wind their way around my city transporting millions of commuters from one place to another – and found that personal space and habits lose all importance. I sat there watching life out the train window and inside the compartment, wondering at the number of people piling in and out of the bogies at breakneck speed. There were people spitting, throwing plastic bags, pieces of paper, fruit peels and who knows what else on to the rails, children squatting on the tracks doing a happy and thorough bowel-cleansing and, alongside, women cutting vegetables and meat, vendors selling fried snacks and cotton candy, stalls hawking assorted local medicines, hairclips, T-shirts and umbrellas and so much more.

When I started driving to work in my own car, I would see men in suits leaning back in fancy, foreign-labelled, chauffeur-driven limousines casually tossing empty plastic mineral water bottles out of the window, women glittering with diamonds and immaculate manicures flicking things out of their cars – biscuit packets, magazine tags, plastic bags, even orange peels and chocolate wrappers.

And there will be the civic authorities, made responsible for the task of getting the city’s infrastructure working to par. Highly placed officials finance their luxury homes and travel jaunts abroad with bribes taken to ignore the quality of the asphalt used to pave the streets. Contractors responsible for getting the job done, be it resurfacing the roads or installing safety devices for a metro-railway will use the payments they receive to make their own lives more comfortable, compromising on the effectiveness of whatever task they are assigned, and putting so many lives at risk.

Huge budgets allocated for making my city – or, indeed, so many others all over the world – a better place to live and work in will be used to line pockets of those who hardly deserve the rather dubious honour, destroying any chance of making life better for those who provided the money by paying taxes or creating corpus funds.

The result? Backaches, headaches, miscarriages, accidents, deaths.

Roads once built and surfaced should stay that way for a few years, if not decades, able to withstand the onslaught of heavy container trucks and the lightest of footfalls from a beauty queen alike. Instead, one shower of rain and the potholes appear, reappear, and again. The sand is washed away, the bricks come bursting out and it is as if nothing has been fixed, nothing is built to last, nothing has been done to make life better, nothing changes.