Column

Before the Peddar road appeal, the last time the authorities sent an SOS to the Army was when terrorists defiled structures that some consider to be the icons of India’s pride. Even while 26/11 bullets were ringing out, a few commentators pointed out that Taj and Oberoi were symbols of privilege and such façades merely throw a glint that distracts Indians and visitors from the images of destitution.

Then Salman Rushdie weighed in for the plutocrats and said that it would be obscene to leave people unmourned just because they can eat Rs6,000 soup. Well, he didn’t actually say that, I am paraphrasing for clarity!

At any rate, the current plea for help, issued by the BMC to the army, concerns the faeces of the Peddar road. The manner in which the BMC handles the muck will tell us whether the corporation is classist or not. As you may have read, repairs on a 100-year-old sewage line under a stretch of the road have been causing inconvenience to folks around that area. And yes, also to those who pass by.

Anyway, the Army’s assessment is that BMC’s expectation is unfeasible. The corporation’s mandarins must be crushed because they had put the faeces-pipe project high on their agenda.

“The work at Peddar road was of an urgent nature and so we had written a letter to major general RK Hooda,” municipal commissioner Jairaj Phatak had said.Hooda, the commanding officer for Maharashtra, Gujarat and Goa, and the BMC had wanted to know whether a kind of pre-fabricated, called the Bailey bridge, could be built over a 240-metre stretch of Pedder road. I compliment Pathak for demonstrating great dispatch in identifying urgent work. Once he tackles the problems of a neighbourhood in which Lata Mangeshkar and several government apparatchiks live, he will be able to move on to areas that are full of yokels who whine about piffling troubles.

Take the Adi Sankaracharya Marg of the JVLR, which connects the Eastern Express highway with the city’s western artery. A huge swath of land on the marg, near IIT-Powai, has been dug up, resulting in a passage that looks like the choked throat of a chicken. To characterise the vehicles on that stretch as ‘traffic’ would be inaccurate; it has always seemed like a car park to me.

But I do not know why people complain about it with sulking, juvenile rage. The road has been a choked-chicken-neck for only four years. Just four years for God’s sake. People as such learn to put up with such trivial disruptions and let Pathak concentrate on Peddar road. Folks around Powai are gritty middle-class survivors, and we should be magnanimous and allow all help to be channelled into the genteel precincts of Peddar road whose good people are too rich and too educated to be subjected to inconvenience.

And people who pass by the bottleneck near Thakur Complex on the Western Express highway, should make similar allowances. After all, the road near the complex has been atrophied for only three years. So what if dirt from the stalled traffic clogs your throat? You don’t plan to become Maharashtra minister, do you?