MTC buses seen plying during peak hours. | Photo Credit: S_KOTHANDARAMAN
Among the great unifiers of any metropolis are shared experiences. And what can be more shared than public transport? Stories swapped and friendships formed by regular commuters are legendary. Mumbai perhaps holds pride of place when it comes to these relationships but Chennai has its own. Among the enduring symbols of the city are the suburban railway service, the MRTS, the Pallavan (which is still referred to that way after years of name change), the auto rickshaw and now the Metro. Each has its adherents. And they are the real stuff of which a city is made.
Inadequacies
Chennai’s modern history can be summed up as one long lament about the inadequacies of its public transport. In the 1800s there were complaints about the behaviour of palanquin bearers. The masulah boat operators who plied between shore and the place where ships halted before the construction of the harbour were a law unto themselves and the stories about them could fill a book. They were in every way the ancestors of the present day auto-rickshaw drivers. Then came the jutka operators whose lasting legacy is the word saavu grakki.
The hand-pulled rickshaws and the cycle rickshaws came thereafter. The trams may be the stuff of romance today but in their time, people found fault with every aspect of their operation. The MTC service is no different. As is the MRTS. The problem is, none of the masulah boat men or the palanquin bearers or the rickshaw pullers or the auto rickshaw men or bus drivers wrote their histories. If they had we would have had a counter point, a view of us end users.
Where would the city be without these? Cinema recognised this first and the 1955 film Town Bus was very likely the first of its kind. Unusually it featured a woman as a bus conductor and what is more the hero on being sacked as driver, becomes an auto rickshaw operator! Real life is sometimes more interesting. In 1986, I was training in Best & Crompton, Tondiarpet and the MTC (it was Pallavan then) route I took had a pitstop somewhere near Central Station. The driver of the bus would halt at a point where his wife would be waiting with his lunch bag. The regulars greeted her and a few seconds would be spent in good-natured banter before we sped on. In 2015, The Hindu published a report about how regulars of route 61A organise a felicitation for the bus crew each year. They clean the bus on that day and new clothes given to the drivers and conductors. There are countless stories over the years about auto rickshaw drivers returning bags of cash and jewels, and of bus drivers halting their vehicles so that a pregnant woman could deliver. There are tales of drivers steering their buses to safety just before having a heart attack, often fatal.
Bus transport has other city elements that cannot be forgotten and these are perhaps unique to Chennai. There is/was Bus Day when vehicles of certain routes were hijacked by students of some colleges and taken on a joy ride around the city. The High Court brought that to an end. There is also the concept of Route Thala or a hero of a particular bus route, which has often ended in tragedy. The real route thala is in reality the crew – the driver and the conductor who carry on despite all that happens. Compared to the bus service, the railway users seem to be a more subdued lot. And the CMRL is too recent for it to develop such linkages and stories. But I look forward to the day when a film will be made with the Metro as its thread.
