This is the third article in a three-part series on the Delhi metro. Read the first and second articles.
Concluding this mini-series on the DMRC, we turn our gaze inwards.
Readers of the last two pieces might have been led to believe that we find nothing positive about the Delhi metro, but this would be a partial reading of how we view it. If we had such a negative attitude towards the metro, we would not be using it with the regularity that we do.
Try imagining a situation when the metro stops for a day. Almost 1.5 million people will have to find alternate modes of transport to reach their destinations. If you count their return journey, 3 million passengers (or commuters if you prefer the Americanism) are using the metro on a daily basis. Considering that it started commercial operations with a single line only in 2002, this is no mean figure.
The Delhi Metro is already the fourth largest urban transport network in the world, an estimate based on a rough projection released by DMRC at the end of March 2017. The average daily ridership as on March 29, 2017 was 2.76 million on a total track length of 213 kilometres, scheduled to increase to 350 kilometres by the time phase III gets completed by the end of 2018 or a little later. So in all probability, this figure is an underestimate.
In actual fact, the ridership would have been higher had DMRC not lost more than 500,000 commuters daily as a result of the last fare hike.
In this piece, we wish to talk about an overwhelming majority of these millions of passengers who need the metro to survive, to travel to work to earn a living, to reach academic or training institutes, to attend on the ailing, to travel to open spaces to unwind, to meet friends and relatives, to join festivities or memorial services, to visit shrines and for millions of other reasons.
Also Read: The Delhi Metro’s Facade of Precarious Finances Shouldn’t Fool Anyone
We don’t want to talk about their individual stories, though that would be a fascinating study of a sliver, a very representative sliver, of the almost incomprehensible diversity of this country; a diversity that is sought to be buried within the suffocating cloak of regimented denominational identities on a daily basis.
The collective common denominator
We will instead talk about the collective common denominator: the commuter, because despite their phenomenal diversity, once they begin to move towards the metro station, they tend to acquire a strangely different personality. It is this transformed persona that begins to move as one amorphous fluid mass, each one becoming a part of this mass, acquiring, as it were, a different psyche, increasingly beginning to move at the same speed, to mimic the actions of other constituents, raising their arms for security checks, placing their bags in the maw of the X-Ray machines and retrieving them as the machines continues to regurgitate.
All over the world, commuters move and behave like this when in the grip of a rapid mass transport system. The crowd that moves in Delhi has some unique characteristics and it is these that we wish to talk about.
Stand in the concourse area and watch this moving mass. On first view, it appears like a huge blob of congealed hot-tar slithering down a slope. Continue watching and you see other movements, some of the constituent units seem to have a life of their own, these free radicals, if one may call them that, twist and turn, side stepping the slower molecules, a little nudge here, a push there and they now lead the charge to the platform. Once at the platform, they suddenly seem to lose interest; they do not rush to join the queues that seem to be meant essentially for the old, the middle aged, the women and the children.
Some of the free radicals might be spied hovering around the queues but they are trying to appear detached, unconnected, trying to create the impression that they really aren’t present there. Through all bodily gestures, they try to communicate the message that though they are accompanying their wife, family elders and budding representatives of the next generation of free radicals, they are not part of the “queue-joining” types. The free radical does not join a queue, it is infra-dig, he is macho, he is the Man and men do not queue up.
When the metro does arrive, they are the first ones to get in with magical alacrity, discarding their apparent lack of interest in their surroundings. Those queuing up realise much too late that those who were not in the queue to board are already in. Suddenly, all the seats are gone, including the ones meant for women, the elderly and the infirm. Having grabbed all the available seats, the free radicals become one with their smart phones, the union is so intense that neither the carvers of Khajuraho nor those who spent all their lives to merge with the supreme-being can ever dream of approximating this erasure of duality.
File photo of the Delhi metro. Credit: PTI
The sleep deprived commuter
There are of course exceptions to this general rule and these are the sleep deprived. They fall asleep the moment they are able to grab a seat. One can notice a strange connect between these sleepers and their seats. You will notice that those who doze off the moment they find a parking slot are almost always occupying seats reserved for women, the aged and the infirm. When all the places are taken, the macho men of Delhi and even a few women, somehow drag their unwilling bodies to the vestibule between two bogies and collapse on the floor as if this was their sole ambition from the day they were born.
Between June 2017 and May 2018, the DMRC authorities fined 51,441 people for violating rules and collected a grand sum of Rs 89,94,380. One could argue that out of three million passengers daily, this is an insignificant number. Stop here a moment. What if the person denied the seat was you? What if the old woman who could not get in to the train because a free radical pushed her aside and got in just as the doors closed was your mother? What if those sitting in the vestibule were unable to get up and move out of harm’s way when a short circuit started a fire in the metro (and there have been fires caused by short circuits in the metro)?
Also Read: Is the Delhi Metro Really Public Transport?
These figures are not insignificant and these violations, obstructing the gate, sitting in the vestibule, pushing and shoving can turn a minor mishap into a major tragedy. Also consider the fact that the metro security personnel do not travel in the metro all the time and therefore, those caught are only a tip of the iceberg. Just think of the ones that you have seen violating these simple rules and think of the times when you have been in violation and have escaped without inviting a fine.
The one meaningless rule
Of all the rules that the metro has made, there is only one that is absolutely meaningless: prohibiting photography. In this day and age, when there are satellites recording every square inch of the earth at every moment, it is a patently idiotic rule. Aside from this, all others rules are designed to make our journey more comfortable and safer and yet we break them all the time. This is like the rules enforcing the usage of helmets seat belts. Both were made for us and were systematically broken by us, the intended beneficiaries of these rules. There are just a handful of citizen friendly rules in this country and it is the citizens who violate them all the time. Just doesn’t make sense, does it?
These three traits – breaking queues, pushing and grabbing seats meant for others, noticed so regularly among the able-bodied males, are markers not unique to Delhi metro. We have grown up in this city watching these gender markers on display in other public transport modes of Delhi: the DTC buses and at any place where queues are necessary or where there are fewer seats than the population of the weak-kneed.
We have often wondered if these traits are unique to Dilliwalahs, but then who is a Dilliwalah? Everyone who lives in Delhi – except for the Jaats and Gujjars, who have been here before most others – comes from migrant stock. So is this ‘knees becoming wobbly at the sight of a seat’ a unique national trait? And if this is so, then are there also civilisational or anthropological explanations for this need to eat where it is not permitted, to spit where one should not and to litter despite constant reminders not to?
The problem of littering
We have no idea how to stop people from consuming food and beverages in the metros, one of the leading sources of littering. Fortunately, the CISF does not allow alcohol on the platforms – whether in a bottle or in the generous tummies of tipplers – or else we would have to face a whole new situation.
Littering, to borrow another Americanism, is a “different ball game altogether”. No matter how many Swachata Abhiyans are conducted, people will not stop littering. This is because they have been programmed to believe that it is not their job to pick-up their trash. they have been told that Brahma, the creator has fashioned people whose point of existence is to clean up after all the litter-generators and so people spread trash and dirt and filth with impunity as if this is a religious duty, the very purpose of their existence.
So litter is going to stay as long as the caste system stays. It will stay as long as we do not become our own scavengers and that is not going to happen any time soon.
But can we at least stop pushing and shoving and learn to offer our seats to the elderly, the infirm and women? Can young women occupying women’s seats vacate them for the elderly and infirm women? Can we all stop eating and spilling coke and other sticky aerated drinks all the time and can we, please, not play our favourite music and speak so loudly with generous use of expletives while talking to our friends or on our phones? Can we try and make the expansive metro journeys a little less stressful, a little better, a little more enjoyable?
Sohail Hashmi is a filmmaker, writer and heritage buff.