New India Is An
Exciting Overlay
Driving from New Delhi to Goa for the first time, some 2000
kilometres, I confirm and discover that there are four or six-lane expressways
that enable consistent speeds of over a 100 km throughout. That is, for all expect
the last bit, from naturally air-conditioned Belgaum to touristy Goa.
All of it, these
stupendous roads, conceived of and initiated by former prime minister Atal
Behari Vajpayee in his terms at the helm of the NDA, is now built and
completed, an amazement to me in itself. It is not often when India completes,
substantially and fulsomely, what it has begun.
And these roads, will transform the connectivities in this
country, if they have not already done so. To drive along them involves the paying of
scores of tolls, but adding up to no more than perhaps Rs. 3,000/-, a modest
enough fraction of what one would pay in the EU or elsewhere, probably as much
or more in Euro, for such a cross-country jaunt today.
Thank God once again
for our robust numbers which help to keep the charges modest. But most of the
roads are indeed as good as anything abroad, except for the fact that very few eligible Indians drive across the country for
pleasure, or indeed, business. Most
upwardly mobile middle class Indians are essentially noveau riche in attitude, and thus oblivious of many finer points
that make for the nuanced life. In their thinking and values, it is preferable,
as a status thing, to fly everywhere,
and be driven, rather than drive, for the rest. The lure of the ‘open road’ as
a metaphor for freedom and renewal is mostly an American thing and little
comprehended here.
So these wonderful roads are almost exclusively the province
of the pan- India travelling trucks, driven by hard working if prosaic illiterates,
hauling all manner of cargo. And reasonably localised movements of motorcycles
carrying entire families, commuters between obscure villages, tractors carrying
sugarcane, and the like.
And those of the middle /entrepreneurial classes who swan around
on these roads in their high performance modern cars, are served, along the new
highways, by a liberal sprouting of KFC’s and McDonalds and the home grown Café Coffee Days, interspersed
with more desi fare, both vegetarian
and non-vegetarian. I even spotted a Parsi Dhaba in the neighbourhood of
Bharuch. The pizzas, burgers and food courts, the malls on the edge of cities,
an occasional hyper-market out in the sticks, all bear the stamp of their
foreign franchisors, compete with dhabas glorified into a tinsel roadhouse gaudiness. These gaily-lit
roadhouses reek of bad housekeeping and questionable hygiene standards, hobbled by lack of
sophistication and indifferent wares. There is an uncomfortable feeling that
great roads do not do the whole trick. They seem to be a modern overlay on a
sensibility struggling to catch up.
Still, the gaudy roadhouses survive in their numerousness,
across the several states I drove through, perhaps because they have large
parking aprons and cater to the truckers and the villagers along the routes.
But on these new highways, there are no standardised Best Western style motels to cater to
the wonders and the solaces of the open road for the middle classes. The larger
petrol pumps try to provide some amenities, but all is not seamless yet. There
is probably not enough demand for such infrastructure along these wonderful
roads, but this could change in the future as mofussil incomes in tier two and
three towns/cities rise to mirror those of the tier one metropolises. The
housing estates being built alongside certainly suggest this, even if one might
have to get away into the interior to see swaying mustard fields in the future.
And that final stretch, from Belgaum to Goa, under 200 km.,
by the coast, is a two-lane scenic road from decades ago. The cities I passed through are bustling, but
there is much inner-city decay from the years of stagnation that has been the bequest
of Socialism. These hang there still,
sometimes shabby, derelict, or overtaken, but still an eyesore on the landscape like stubborn
carbuncles that refuse to be obliterated.
The contrast is stark and devastating to witness; and the disconnect
between the open road of the expressways, and the higgledy-piggledy slums, the
unplanned sprawl that often abuts the fancy roadways, is self-evident, if sad.
The new India will, it seems, have to completely replace the
old India, lock stock and barrel, but fortunately not the ancient India of
enormous wealth, wisdom and accomplishments. This post-independence oldness is
not very profound, except for the fact that it mocked what was once solid, but
being insubstantial itself, has run out of its luck. Not only that, it is
embarrassingly clear that the Socialism of decades past has utterly failed us,
and these puissant roads pulsating with trucks is a welcome departure from that
debacle of economic disappointment.
What it created, quite unintentionally, is a divorcing of
the obsolete ugliness and inadequacy of the past. That stuff cannot be spliced
into the present and the future. But since it has survived and exists against
the odds, it must be regarded like a close relative who refuses to be locked
away Jane Eyre fashion. But who nevertheless, and all too often, stamps about
the stage, angst-ridden, in all its gaucherie and unrestrained squalor. It cannot,
alas, be sanitised and deodorised into conformity. Indeed, all our past failures,
elaborate and wrapped up in the shrink-wrap of denial, refuse to die. And
present successes, considerable as they are, look like they are some distance
away from a clear ascendancy.
(928 words)
January 24th,
2014
Gautam Mukherjee
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