The other day, when the internet facility in my area got shut down, I came to face a rather odd circumstance. As I attempted to book a cab to go out, I discovered, much to my shock and horror, that app-based cab bookings were not possible owing to the shutdown. Living away from my home city, I’ve never tried to travel in any other mode of transport, such as the metro, public buses and ordinary taxis, primarily because of my concern for personal safety.
Left with no real choice, I ventured to find a regular taxi for my travel, but with fear fluttering in every corner of my heart. While I stood at the corner of the road and waved with both hands, quite like a fool, to test my luck in stopping a passing taxi, a superb thought came to my mind. It was when I was left without the ease of such means of transport that I realised the immense importance of public transport, the convenience we have often ignored in the midst of the availability of conveyance that we own. This convenience, albeit often overlooked, is the primary reason for the life that bustles in everyday society. Public transport, often unacknowledged and unsung among some sections of society, is the principal product of our progress of transportation.
The struggle of travelling from place to place has petered out in this set-up of honking horns and smoking vehicles. We carry only the chunks of our daily lives and hardly any gratitude for the transportation network that makes it possible. So tangled are our fast-moving lives that we have no time to take a break and think about the value that is added to our existence by the transport system. This indifference, I believe, is the primary cause of our ignorance of the advantages of public transportation.
While we are all merry about advances in locomotive technology and are currently celebrating the prospect of bullet trains in India, we fail to look at the other side of it, the dangerous face of it. There are so many of us unaware of the extent of India’s ecological wealth that was destroyed with the development of the railways in the past century. It is exactly this lack of knowledge about the reality of transportation that promotes the exploitation of our resources, both natural and human.
Today, our cities are filled with these vehicles that reek death. But we continue to sit back and do nothing about it because such is the convenience and such is the enslavement by technology.
That one thought which came to me on a hot Sunday afternoon when I was sweating to find myself a taxi made me ponder over this unfortunate state of humankind. It was around the same time when I came across an essay by a 19th-century writer on a related subject and found a peculiar parallel between his and my ideas of transportation and progress. Robert Lynd wrote in the essay ‘The Chocolate Bus’: “One’s destination has become everything; one’s journey to one’s destination nothing – nothing, at any rate, but a necessary evil.” What was peculiar about the similarity of our opinions was that his were views from a bygone century and mine are those of the present one. Maybe, this progressive demolition of nature and man began a long time before you and I came to our share of existence. Maybe, the modern human being of our century is only working towards taking this demolition to its summit.
But even after writing so much in condemnation of personal conveyance, I will continue to use it out of helplessness, for as feeble person as I cannot walk 300 km from my current place of stay to my home. So will you, my reader — and that is the irony of life.
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