For several months, construction work for the Saket metro station has been going on just outside the block of flats we live in, and the sight of a giant crane hovering over the tops of neighbouring houses makes for a grand view, especially after dark. In every other respect our enclosed colony park is quiet as a village green, but here’s an enormous, brightly lit mechanical pulley moving back and forth in a portion of the sky. It makes us feel like characters in John Wyndham novels set in quiet British towns where nothing much was ever expected to happen.
There used to be something cosy and reassuring about the big finger in the sky keeping watch over us all, but recent events have changed this. Now we look nervously over our shoulders every time we leave the house, wondering when the finger will fall on us. Nor is it pleasing to mull the fact that part of the Metro station lies directly underneath our building. (Which already has a few cracks in its walls, like nearly all DDA flats of a certain age do.)
“Invite bets on what will bring your building crashing down first — a crane falling from above or the subterranean vibrations from the station once the trains start operating,” writes an acquaintance (one hesitates to say “friend”) to whom I mentioned my fears during an email-group conversation. “That way you might have a few savings to build a little hut when the time comes. Just make sure it isn’t located near a Metro site.”
The families of the people who lost their lives last week — and the shopkeepers whose wares were crushed to powder — won’t find any of this funny, but the only alternative to black humour is to participate in countless online polls. “What is responsible for Delhi Metro accident?” asks “BuMex” at Indiatimes (http://tinyurl.com/mwhvel), and the answers pour in. “Subletting of work.” “Overall casual approach.” “Recklessness + hurry + lack of planning + not keeping up schedule.” And eventually, “the legal system” (because Indian contractors know that nothing will happen to them given the pace at which our laws are implemented). A comment on the widely viewed YouTube video of the second accident explain that “these cranes don’t operate by magic. If you lift more than capacity, they fail…Remember, the angle of the dangle, times the square of the hair equales the heat of the meat” (sic).
There are suggestions of foreign conspiracy: “These cranes are bought from which country? From the video I saw, it had some Chinese or Japanese characters on it. We must investigate if the country is hostile to us.” (And then do what? Invade it with our flawlessly designed and maintained MiG-21 planes?) But there are also dark mutterings about an internal plot. On the Rediff news item about the removal of Project Director Vijay Anand (http://tinyurl.com/md7xo7), one poster announces that “Anand is active member of Sangh Parivar”. “How does it matter?” another retorts, “He was not fired for corruption. He was fired for faulty design & lapse. Sangh Parivar does lots of things but does it teach you how to build faulty bridges?”
Meanwhile, a movement called Pillar 67 (website: http://pillar67.com/, Facebook group: http://tinyurl.com/ndmmpx) has written an open letter to Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit, asking for the construction of a memorial “for all lives that Delhi Metro has claimed during its construction”. Others on the Facebook page propose the naming of Metro stations after the people who died. More symbolic gestures that will probably have no bearing on either the progress of the investigation or the compensation due to the victims’ families. So it goes.
