Subir Roy: All change into buses please

OFFBEAT

My father held what was considered one of the most respectable jobs in those days. But even as a class one government officer, he never owned a car. Some of his friends and colleagues did, but circumstances were not the same for everybody.

As I grew up in Kolkata, using public transport virtually always, what I looked forward to was to always have enough money to hire a taxi cab when I needed to. The fact that they were so ubiquitous and affordable played a role, as did its value system then. Showing off with something costly classified you as nouveae riche and put you down in the pecking order. It was by no means a declassed society, only that a true snob never sported flashy things. And owning a car, no matter how tin pot in those days, made you stand out in a material way.

Things changed as I moved on in life and went to Delhi. Both distances and the value system in that city were different. You needed to own a car for logistical and other reasons. Someone who came by bicycle was easily classified as eccentric, a youngish fellow on a two wheeler said he had just started off on life's journey and had a way to go. A man in his thirties with wife and toddler in tow who came by three-wheeler was all right, but held no guarantee that he would eventually arrive.

I got my first car when I was precisely forty and was rather proud that I was able to pick up driving quite well at that age. It was a second hand Fiat or Premier Padmini which looked quite respectable despite costing under Rs 30,000. And thus began a long journey during which one car replaced another and I gloried in the sense of power that sitting at the steering wheel gave and relished the creature comforts and sense of freedom that journey by your own car brought you.

Great as these were, owning our own car changed life for our family the most by opening up the plains, hills and forests of north India. Life moved from holiday to holiday, with the time in between spent waiting and planning for the next one when we could go discover some new place. The romance of Rajasthan, right upto the sand dunes of Sam, and the endless glory of the UP and Himachal hills, all came within our affordable reach. We did it all then in a Maruti 800, carrier bolted on top and baggage strapped onto it, hundreds of kilometres, interspersed by nights spent in affordable state tourism hotels and sometimes outstanding forest rest houses.

But through all this I did not lose touch with the public bus. Once we moved to Gurgaon, I discovered you could get a bargain in very good journey time by doing it by bus from ITO with a change at Dhaula Kuan. And when I moved to Bangalore, it was a pleasure to rediscover buses that were clean and not so crowded, like they were in Kolkata in the fifties.

As our children have grown up, I have been fighting what I initially thought was a losing battle for buses. The first time they got onto a bus they thought it was kind of cute. For the most part my wife thought it was safer and quicker to send them to school by car and that was that.

Now that they have grown up and moved on they tell different stories. Our daughter who reads in Delhi wants to quickly learn how to drive a car, since we will not let her ride a scooter (not with the way people drive in Delhi). She longs for the freedom that her own transport will bring her.

Our son, on the other hand, is determined not to learn driving too early. He is scared he will be made the family chauffer. Plus, some of the culture of Chennai where he is reading appears to have rubbed off on him. He is happy to use trains and buses and is quite proud the way he can haggle with its autorickshaw-wallas despite having next to no Tamil.

Now, as our life view changes with the threat of global warming hanging over us, I wonder where the car will end up in its journey by the time my own journey is done. Fortunately, both our children quite like biking. As for me, I look forward to times when there will not just be fewer cars and more buses but ones that are cleaner and better. The air-conditioned Volvo buses in Bangalore are super; only there are so few of them.

There is something social about buses; you get to know people on them even without talking to them. And by far the best way to get to know a city is to bus around it, that is after you have done as much walking and biking as you can. How fascinating that the capitalist dynamic has taken us so far down the road of individual transport, before bringing us back to where we always belonged, closer to fellow humans, maybe on a bus.

subir.roy@bsmail.in