The Common Man at 5 pm

What is so special about 5’o clock in the evening? Stupid question, really. Wait, 5’o clock on a weekday? That question is not so irrelevant. The small time window from 5 pm to 6 pm is very crucial for the common man or woman. It is the time widow in which a lot of things are set in motion. A lot of people are, at any rate, in motion or contemplating it at that time. I have lived in Kozhikode almost all my life till date and can claim an intimate knowledge of the way the city moves at this time. If I do not have first hand knowledge of some cases, I can hazard a pretty good guess. So what are the various citizens of Kozhikode doing in this little time window? The little offspring of modern parents, too young to go to school, too old for the cradle is hanging on the window frame or gate of the play-school or crèche waiting to go home. His little stomach is rumbling a little and making him regret pelting his friends with his lunch, which had seemed such a capital idea at the time. The young mother of this remarkable child is running out of her office. Being a zealous new member of the working community, her bag is heavy with some incomplete work. She is planning the menu for the night, worrying about the fate of her son’s lunch and hoping against hope that she is in time for the bus home at 5.10 pm. The somewhat older working woman is unhurried in her motions, she knows exactly how much time it will take to get out of the office, walk to the bus stop and catch the bus with a margin for talking to chums and purchasing vegetables on the way. She does not pack her work because she knows it will keep, knows exactly what dinner is going to be and is extremely interested in the reality show at 8pm. She boards the bus at 5.15 pm, nods to familiar faces, purchases her ticket home; the conductor does not have to ask her where she is going. Most of the school going population belonging to the carefree age group of 4 to 12 years is already at home, engaged in a recreational activity of their choice and therefore not subject to this discussion. However, thanks to the current trend of encouraging creative and artistic tendencies from a young age, many of them would be at their swimming, badminton, painting, dance, music or karate classes and will have to be picked up at 5.30 or 6. Now the other student group living in the shadow of terror of board exams, entrance exams etc- they would be dwelling on dinner, the latest movie, the cricket score, person sitting a few benches away or some other subject of their choice which bears no intentional resemblance to what they have been expected to absorb during the past hours of tuition, entrance class or extra classes at school which they happen to be attending. These uniform clad people will then try to make their way home in whatever mode of transport is available and willing to carry them. The young unmarried working community of which I am going to be a part and the college going community which I was till recently part of, generally move about as the whim takes them and are difficult to be fit into a definite time frame. Now, let us talk of the husbands young enough to be leaving the office relatively early say 5.30ish. They are walking out of their offices, helmets under their arms, hoping their bikes have enough petrol to get them home. They are in the process of fumbling in their pockets for keys when they encounter the shopping list which has been in residence for a few days. So, they resolve to drop by Varkeys on the way to avert a domestic explosion which would undoubtedly occur on turning up without the grocery again. The fathers of the aforementioned creative children are desperately squeezing their Marutis, Hyundais or Indicas into smaller and smaller openings in the traffic hurrying to pick up their wards whose classes ended at least 10 minutes ago. The fathers of children big enough to commute on their own have not yet thought about leaving office so they too can also be excluded from our sample space. So, on a working day in Kozhikode, between 5 and 6 pm, all these people are trying to move between their respective points A and B as our math teachers are so fond of saying.

 

Now imagine what happens when the traffic gets held up on such a day, at this time. Simply put, you get a lot of people frozen in their respective stages of motion, worried, tired, hungry and very very angry. How does the traffic get clogged in Kozhikode city? All roads here lead through if not to Mananchira. Almost all buses touch some part of Mananchira in their trips. So, if Mananchira gets clogged for a sufficiently long time, the city traffic grinds to a halt. Another lovely subplot in this little tale from hell is that once you are caught in the jam, you stay there, unless you are one of the more ingenious auto drivers.Though the volume of traffic has increased manifold in the past few years, the width of roads has remained the same. Now, you will probably be tapping your fingers irritably the unasked question being – All this to talk about traffic jams? What is so great about that? Every city has traffic jams. And it is not even as though Kozhikode is that big a city. To all these thoughts, I say bear with me for a bit more. I have a point, I promise. Let us look at what happens when a public meeting is held here. The first factor is the venue. The bigger political meetings are held at the Muthalakkulam ground or if the gathering is even bigger, the beach. The space in front of Jayanthi buildings, on one side of the Palayam bus stand, is popular for smaller gatherings. These places are all, in and around Mananchira, or approachable by some road leading via Mananchira. The other factor is the time. These meeting are usually scheduled to begin around 3 in the afternoon, but due to the famous Indian attitude towards punctuality, they are invariably a few hours late which brings the whole thing into the time window between 5 and 6 pm. Ergo when such a meeting is held Kozhikode city comes to an unwilling standstill or if the event is big enough, reschedules its activities so that the peak hour gets shifted to 4 pm to 5 pm or even 3.30 to 4.30 pm.

On 24^th June I read an interesting and somewhat amusing bit of news. The high court had issued an order prohibiting political meeting in public places, especially roadsides on working days. The news report can be read here. I smiled on seeing it, my thoughts being – what a humongous bit of wishful thinking. I also indulged in a bit of wistful speculation of the Utopian Kozhikode which would emerge if the idea could indeed be made practical. A few days later when the state celebrated one of its periodic hartal festivals on Saturday, 26^th June, I had the opportunity of sitting at home and flipping channels. This was when a curious snippet of news caught my eye. A politician, identified by the signature white and white, and a senior at that (identified by his grey hairs) had the media’s undivided attention (I later learnt that this  *ehem* gentleman was Mr.M.V.Jayarajan) He was talking, extremely loudly in spite of the microphones thrust in his face, about the high court ban.  The somewhat censored news clip can be watched here. The key dialogues being – (a) the judges who brought out this order are absolute idiots (b) the public would hold them in contempt for bringing out such an antisocial order. Whoa! What an accurate and concise estimation of public sentiment. I wonder who he was talking about when he said ‘the public’. The public who wish there was a ‘none of the above’ option in elections? The public half of who don’t feel the need to vote? Not them, they are out of context. It is not election time – yet. The only ‘public’ who seem to fit this bill are the ones who arrive from god knows where to swell the numbers at these events. Surely he must mean them.

We live in a state which boasts of complete literacy and an extremely high degree of political awareness, but we rarely mention an equally high level of cynicism and complacency. We have grown used to waiting for hours caught up in traffic jams just because some little ‘leader’ with just enough following decided to take out a rally protesting against some news item, someone calling someone else names, a dictator being hanged in another country, India losing in cricket, America making war on Iraq or anything which caught their fancy. We have also fallen into the habit of occasional rathyatras and pathyatras and other miscellaneous yatras our leaders undertake from time to time, always at snails pace and invariably causing the traffic to be held up sometimes hours on end. We understand that there are people whose livelihood is based on attending these events dressed in the trademark white and white. They are not going to allow this august tradition, of stopping whole cities in their tracks as a show of strength, to die out just because the court told them to. The public or more popularly put, the common man, is the one I have described initially, the one whose life gets paused on the whim of others. It is a rare breed of fool who imagines that this common man entertains loving thoughts towards those responsible for holding him up at 5’o clock on a weekday. The common man’s thoughts regarding the person or persons responsible for a traffic jam at any time can be expressed as an extremely long and vehement *beeeeeeeeep*. I am qualified to say this because I am one of ‘the public’, I have been there and I have thought that and other extremely uncharitable thoughts. Mr. M.V. Jayarajan can volunteer any number of opinions in the name of the public secure in the knowledge of their aforementioned complacency. But he had better pray hard that it remains that way and ‘the public’ do not decide all of a sudden to start speaking their own opinions for a change. Ending this tirade with a stray thought – if the judges felt that the public held them in contempt, they could resign their office. What would Mr.Jayarajan resign from?  Wearing white?