Something about the presumed sanctity of all that air-cooling, the spotless platforms and the CCTVs overawes us perhaps. The Delhi Metro does not want to leave anything to chance, however. Those of us who regard India as a flailing state when it comes to providing education, healthcare and administering justice are surprised to find that it is also a nanny state that outdoes Singapore. Almost nothing — except for sitting, breathing and disembarking — is permissible. A ride home is peppered with at least two sternly worded admonitions per stop. Sitting on the floor is not permitted nor is listening to audible music. For men to enter the first ‘ladies only’ carriage is a criminal offence. Fair enough, but why, one can’t help wonder, is taking plastic metro tokens home also deemed a semi-criminal act? There was a scam by employees in May, but still... Writing in the 1970s, the great Welsh writer Jan Morris observed, “Big Brother is everywhere, with a slide rule, a clipboard and a warning in small print. ‘This map,’ says one Delhi tourist publication severely, ‘is published for tourists as a master guide and not as legal tender’.”
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Last week, a train was stopped for several minutes while the public address repeated like a mantra that taking the train an extra stop to the ITO station where it terminated when you intended to be on the return journey was — you guessed it — an offence punishable by a fine. It is hard to think of any country, let alone one administered by a government that goes round and round in circles, where going the wrong way for one stop would count as a misdemeanour. Within minutes, there were staff in the ladies’ compartment lecturing everyone guilty of trying to ensure they had a seat for the long journey home that they could be fined Rs 50.
Still, for many of us, and for women in particular, being on the metro is liberating. A petite colleague says she tells her Mumbai friends it may be a better city for women in all respects, but in Delhi, “We have the Metro”. It certainly makes large parts of the sprawling metropolis accessible; Natraj’s dahi bhalle in Chandni Chowk seems next door. The ride is smooth even in a monsoonal downpour.
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So it was on Saturday that I had my bemused driver drop me to a station and headed for Nehru Place — a Singapore-style food court with a metro station attached. The rain came down in sheets as I exited but my raincoat was redundant as I was soon seated close to Kerala Express. I noticed that the police were taking a rather long time at a neighbouring outlet. Then we heard a cook at the Middle Eastern restaurant nearby had returned the previous night completely drunk and been found dead early in the morning.
Put an appam and stew in front of me and life and death seem rather trivial matters, but even my boarding schoolboy gluttony was stopped in its tracks when we discovered that the body was in a kitchen 30 metres away. I had just read this paper’s magisterial assessment of the Aarushi case and the soul-destroying incompetence of a madhouse investigation built on a crime scene, not unlike Godhra, that people walked in and out of at will. Anywhere else in the world, the body would have been quickly removed. But, in the new New Delhi, a boisterous children’s party carried on just next to henna-haired policemen conducting their investigation. Hide-and-seek might have resulted in a child being traumatised after tripping over a corpse with rigor mortis setting in.
There are times when you rail at the indignities and ineptitude of our policing and there are times when you hypocritically do that, but want to eat your Malabar paratha, too. The owner of Kerala Express, the warm and witty ex-model Joey Matthew had risen from battling the flu to ply us with prawn biryani and more mutton pepper fry. It seemed churlish to refuse.The bill was a fraction of what it would have been at a full service restaurant and we didn’t even have to worry about parking, I thought, as we left the police to the serious business at hand. The journey home promised more scolding — “Do not ride with your backpack on your back” — but I vowed to tune out just as everyone else seems to do. When you have picnicked amid a police investigation with a corpse just metres away, a nanny state’s prim instructions seem like so much hot air.
Twiiter: RahulJJacob