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The strike called by officers of PSUs in the oil and gas sector set off fumes of disgust from the common people.

Indeed, people were united by inconvenience, as they were by terror. As for inconvenience, I cannot think of a stronger impulse to rouse the rabble than forcing it to endure the indignity of abandoning its cars and taking trains to work.

I have a friend who usually threatens to dock his driver’s salary if the hapless man ever wears the same trousers on two consecutive days. My friend is terrified that microbes and dragons would fall off his driver’s unpressed pantaloons and infest his car. “It is vulgar to repeat clothes,” my friend had told me once. Vulgar, by the way, comes from Latin ‘vulgus’, meaning ‘common people’!

Getting back to the story, my friend, like many other people who flew back to Mumbai from outstation trips on Friday morning, found himself paying Rs300 for a short auto trip -from the Santa Cruz airport to Vile Parle, in his case.

“The vulgar auto fellows will make a killing in situations such as this,” he told me on the phone. “But I will not let the even more vulgar striking fellows win.” But he did mutely pay Rs300 and, bravely, did not ask the autodriver if he had used the hand sanitiser that morning. What can I say about my friend? He is resilient. When VS Naipaul writes in A House for Mr. Biswas:

Contempt, quick, deep, inclusive, became part of his nature. It led to inadequacies, to self-awareness and a lasting loneliness. But it made him unassailable…...he could have been writing about my friend and 90% of Mumbai. Well, 90% may be a bit of an exaggeration, particularly when it comes to self-awareness.

At any rate, as I said at the beginning of this admittedly discursive piece, the oil crisis brought some people to together in an enforced green initiative. Hurriedly organised car pools sprung up in many neighbourhoods across Mumbai. So a lot more people went to work than normally do in the circumstances, and they did so in fewer cars.

That makes me wonder, won’t it be a great idea to order a regular shutdown of petrol and diesel pumps on a few days each month? That way people will be aware of the impending shortage, plan alternatives that will have to be green, de facto.

Not only will this rationing save fuel, it will also make people will lose their monomaniacal dependence on cars and cause less pollution. The roads, too, will have to deal with a lighter load.

I think the idea is worth a try; after all, pedestrianisation of select zones has worked across many cities of the world. This will be Mumbai’s chance to take the movement one step forward. Besides, the next time oil officers threaten to go on strike, Mumbai can tell them to enjoy a few extra days off to take a course in customer relations.