Subir Roy: Post-modern India of sudden death

OFFBEAT

Getting into Bangalore airport was not too difficult, the traffic on Airport Road was predictably heavy in early evening but manageable. But the scene inside was unbelievable. There were what looked like half a dozen queues snaking their way around the whole check-in area, making it difficult to get to the machines that scan your baggage or the check-in counters.

The real adventure began after we had checked in and headed for the gates to go in for security clearance. Among all those queues which snaked round and round, which one led to which gate? Every time we asked, the people in the queue told us, this queue begins way back. So we kept tracing the queue to its origin, came back to the same spot twice via a different queue and eventually found the tail to the queue which was like a compressed S.

After an hour and 10 minutes, we finally made it to the frisking and I couldn't help asking the security staff, what's up, why this log jam, was the airport closed for VIP traffic for some time? The man was cool. No, nothing wrong, he said, this is routine every Friday and Saturday evening; in fact, today it's a bit light. Welcome to Resurgent India, where airline queues beat railway booking counter queues!

At Kolkata airport, baggage cleared in good time, we headed for the pre-paid taxi counter looking forward to being in bed by midnight. But there was a different type of queue "" 200 people waiting for taxis which kept coming with departing passengers at a slower rate than arriving passengers joining the queue. The only difference was that this was a more well appointed airport so it was not a snaking queue packed into a small area but simply a long, long one. Welcome to Arriving India with the last mile missing.

Coming to attend Swapan's daughter's wedding was merely an excuse, the real reason being to catch up with friends. Swapan was the common link which held together the Presidency College batch of 1969. Since he kept in touch with everybody, all you needed to do was keep in touch with him. The rest would follow.

So Deepak was down from Brussels, or if it is January it must be Dubai. Anol and Kaku were down from Delhi, I was down from Bangalore, Probir was down from Victoria House, or if it is Sunday it must be Tivoli Court (for the uninitiated, top Kolkata addresses) and Amit was down from wherever he was the night before because as HR bigwig of this corporate with a far flung empire, he was travelling all the time.

The wedding was beautiful, the combination of Bengali and Gujarati customs gave you two cultural treats for the cost of one, the food was vegetarian (courtesy to the guests from the boy's side) and divine (I had not had dalpuri or malai and jalebi like that in ages), but how to drop the wife back at Jadavpur at my in-laws? For that you have to cross the nightmare called the Jadavpur thana crossing.

The traffic there was always bad but got worse when the crossing was connected to the bypass, the road that is supposed to deliver the city's well heeled from its traffic and pollution and connect them straight to the airport. At close to 11 pm, we took over 10 minutes to pass the traffic lights. Wedding day (on particular auspicious days every other person in the city is either getting married or attending someone's marriage), too many cars, said the taxi driver nonchalantly So it's not as bad on other days and at other times of the day, I asked. Not so, he said. There is this massive shopping mall that has come up down the road where the South City development is, so on ordinary days and at proper hours there is the normal shopper's jam. So this is as bad as it gets, I said, when we finally cleared the traffic lights. No, said the taxi driver again; wait till the people start moving into the hundreds of apartments that are also a part of South City. Welcome to post-colonial, post-planning market-friendly India where you simply get stranded.

Things must be better in Bangalore, commiserated my friend the next day, as we imbibed gin in the afternoon on the verandah of Calcutta Club, soaking in the sun that has come out at last after days of unseasonal rain and chilly temperatures. Suddenly, not all the sun and gin inside me was enough to keep the chill away and I shuddered.

Don't remind me of Bangalore, I said. If you have your South City we will soon have right near our office in Bangalore, UB City in full blast, several towers of god knows how many hundreds of thousands of square feet and a rooftop helipad to boot, and the same road space. Welcome to post-modern India which is set to meet a sudden death from imbibing too much of auto fumes while stranded in a traffic jam!

subir.roy@bsmail.in