Escaping Flatland

In my usual weekend call with Mom yesterday [related post], she told me about a Photo Exhibition in the Delhi Metro Connaught Place train station entitled Delhi: Then and Now. Though I couldn’t find a link to the exhibition or to the Connaught Place Metro station, I decided to undertake an exploration of the Metro that was Delhi’s Big Dig.

A British tourist provides a humorous essay, without the usual “Best in the World” platitudes or arcane technical details. Some quintessentially-Delhi moments of hilarity:

So many electronic tokens for the automatic ticket gates were taken home as souvenirs, that there was an acute shortage of tokens at the ticket counters - in some cases they ran out completely.

The emergency intercoms installed in all carriages eventually had to be switched off, as so many people buzzed the driver to tell him to drive faster!

Escalators are a little known phenomenon in Delhi. At some of them guards watch and help people to get on and off, at others "passengers" look a bit confused or excited before they timidly get on [Link]

The trains and stations are airconditioned, providing aunties a cheaper alternative to entering jewellery and sari stores in Karol Bagh for heat-respite and a complimentary Coca Cola. And giving students a hangout option beyond Archies (in the 80s), Nirulas (in the 90s) and Barista (in the early ’00). The thought fills me with nostalgia about my IIML days, when we would visit the library for purely non-academic reasons:

Stocking a rich collection of over 60,000 select learning resources in the discipline of management and related areas, in a variety of formats and operating from a 30,000 sq. ft. spacious, centrally located, air-conditioned building, built on most modern lines, equipped with ergonomically designed furniture & fittings... [Link]

A first world visitor might find this paradoxical - employing manual labor on an expensive, automated technology.

Guards show passengers how to use the electronic tokens on the entrance gates (including us, as we look for a slot to push the tokens inside; instead you have to just press it against the marked area on the gate) [Link]

However, consider the factors - a fast-growing economy trying to proselytize new technology; cheap, low-skilled labor; illiterate/tech-unsavvy masses; socialist job-creation mindset - and it begins to make sense. Visit swanky BPO / IT / software park office buildings, and you will see greeters taking passing employees’ access cards and swiping it for them. ATMs will have armed guards protecting the cash-ki-machine.

Kashmir Gate station is very spacious, very clean, very modern... Signs proclaim that photography, smoking and spitting is forbidden, and people actually stick to it: no fag butts on the regularly swept floors, no posing Punjabi family grinning maniacally into a camera, no paan stained walls or corners.

Must be due to all the safai karamcharis they hired, and a sense of civic pride in a resurgent Delhi. This last titbit is purely anecdotal (thanks, Mom), so I don’t have any news sources to back it up.

(To be Continued)