I try to plan my life around traffic but there was one instance when I was actually counting on it being busy. This was for what I imagined would be the ‘perfect feature story’.
A couple of years ago, while working in Mumbai, I was commissioned to do a story about traffic jams. Classic big city reporting cliché yes, but this story had a twist. I would aim to do it while travelling in an ambulance as it navigated its way through traffic.
What I hoped to achieve was a kind of forensic analysis of how disorganised the Mumbai traffic might be, or if there was a sense of order behind the apparent chaos. I wanted to see if vehicles had the space to manoeuvre themselves out of the way when an ambulance needed to cut through and if there were systems in place, like traffic police stepping in, that could help ease the situation. I also wanted to observe what kind of skills an ambulance driver needed to display.
Armed with this ‘perfect image’ of what my story should be, I managed to get the help of a government hospital located in the centre of the city and began hanging out with the ambulance dispatch unit from early morning.
What followed, however, was a sobering contrast between the dramatic image in my mind and the reality. Between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m., the unit was dispatched about nine times to different places, and each time, I eagerly geared myself up to report.
It turned out however, that an ambulance is not dispatched only in times of emergency. There are numerous trips it takes just to cater to the basic logistics of running a hospital. For instance, a patient may have to be transferred from one building to another, or equipment or food may have to be moved between facilities. Members of the ambulance unit were initially sceptical of my idea but, as the day wore on, were totally into the story.
Waiting for emergency
By mid afternoon, we were all in the amusing position of hoping for an emergency call. “It can happen any time,” they said, though I suspect now that they just felt sorry for me as I sat quietly in a corner of the dispatch room, looking ‘hopeful’ every time the phone rang.
More trips between hospital facilities followed and, towards the evening, there was even a trip to transfer a patient to another hospital a few kilometres away, one that proved to be largely uneventful.
I didn’t get my ‘perfect feature story’ but was left with this lingering sense of ‘what if’. Traffic jams are so common in Mumbai that anyone there can recall several instances when he may have heard an ambulance, sirens blaring, trying to cut through. I was so convinced that this would be a great story that I went back thrice to hang out with the same unit.
Members of the unit thought I was a bit crazy and assumed that I must have been particularly jobless to spend hours with them, just waiting. However, they never discouraged me though, predictably, I never got the perfect scenario of that dramatic ambulance ride through busy traffic I assumed was commonplace in Mumbai.
The experience gave me a vague guiding principle, especially when it comes to writing features or other long form stories — never have the perfect scene in mind beforehand and be prepared to write, with a clean slate, on what you see. And, of course, never count on the traffic.
