In the last few years of my stay in Mumbai, we moved into an apartment that was on Juhu beach, adjacent to Holiday Inn and Sun-n-Sand. It was a beautiful flat with three rooms overlooking the sea and only fitted my budget because as the broker explained: "marble nahin hai na". Thank God for that, because I loved the apartment's old-world mosaic flooring and the gorgeous sunsets that its large windows offered.
The only downside was that the apartment was very near to Amitabh Bachchan's residence. So, every Sunday at 5 p m when he came to his verandah to wave to his fans, who routinely collected outside his gate, there would be a traffic jam. Thankfully, the jam was short-lived, with the crowd dispersing when he went back in. We learnt to avoid that time of the week either to make an entry into or an exit from the apartment.
And then, the JW Marriott came up in our backyard. While Holiday Inn and Sun-n-Sand were by then past their sheen and, therefore, saw only modest crowds, the brand new Marriott completely changed the character of the traffic in that area. While everything was the same during the day, it was in the night that the fun began. I remember many evenings coming back from work and getting stuck in horrendous traffic snarls.
Although my home was just two blocks away, I could barely abandon my car and walk down. On leaning out to ask passers-by what the problem was, we were often told "Akshay Kumar ka birthday" or some other excuse. Irritated at the long line of celeb cars that were being shown in by the Marriott security while we were kept at bay, I often fell asleep, only to be woken by the driver when we reached home.
That was a decade ago. I have no idea about how happening or not-happening the area is now because I have moved to Santiniketan, a small town in a less-than-happening state. We were returning from Chennai on March 4. Since March 5 was Holi, according to the West Bengal calendar, and a million people descend on Santiniketan to celebrate the coming of spring, we were unable to get train tickets back to Santiniketan from Kolkata. So, we had to hire a car.
We left the airport around mid-afternoon and drove smoothly till we reached a small town called Guskara, at the border of Burdwan and Birbhum district. By then, it was dusk and since we had got off the highway to take a shortcut, the road was not well-lit. In the haze of the headlights, we could see the traffic congestion ahead. As we neared the jam, we realised it was being caused by trucks, tractors and vans carting potatoes, queuing up to avail of cold storage facilities the next day.
There are many cold storages on that road; all of them with the same problem. Every time we put our heads out to ask the reason for the slow movement, we were told "aloo, aloo". But strangely, unlike in Mumbai, I almost did not mind the wait, because there was an underlying security in numbers in an agrarian area.
Within days of Holi, however, the long line of vehicles in front of the cold storage facilities became longer as news of more potato farmer suicides hit the news. West Bengal has produced a record harvest of potatoes (about 120 lakh tonnes) and has cold storage capacity of only around 65 lakh tonnes.
Security in numbers, did I think?
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