Life
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Thiruvananthapuram
Where the poor are an eyesore
Police personnel and their assistants carrying away a sack of cabbages sold on footpath.
SURELY, CABBAGES are lighter than motorcycles. One can lift more cabbages onto a waiting truck with an ugly contraption of pulleys and chains in a minute than two-wheelers.
We can even set up a relay, thus getting the local "good- for-nothings" to do something worthwhile, making the loading of cabbages more efficient, in the process. How one wishes, the scene in the photograph was half as funny or even absurd as that. The truck with its traffic policemen and their hirelings who operate the pulley and chain mechanism with glee, every time they get the go-ahead to hoist a more two-wheeler, the hapless rider standing by, wondering how much he will have to cough up.
Well, the point is that the hapless rider could be at fault for parking in a "no parking" area, going up a "one way" or anything else the innovative law-keepers can think of.
But what did the vegetable vendors do wrong, trying to make a desperate living. Exactly! They were on the roadside! They were hurting the sensibilities of a task force perhaps or they simply could not vend it like a supermarket.
Early every morning, they trek to one of the wholesale mandis in the City, wait their turn in the hierarchy, until after the larger shops and the gaadivalas have haggled with the middlemen. Then comes their turn and a dalal will shove a sack or half a sack at each of them, take it or leave it.
That is not all. Chances are, the same dalal will loan them the money to buy his sack of cabbages as they are already caught in the vicious circle of baddi and chakrabaddi; the dalal in effect, owns their lives. If there is a special occasion in the family — oh, yes they have families, which keep growing back in the slums they come from — it is back to the same middleman who is only glad to own them a little more.
Once in a while, a public sector bank or an NGO gives these vendors "micro credit" to do something with their lives, but the money simply is not enough to get out of the vicious circle they are trapped in. Now, enter the tiger, as the traffic predator that feasts on two-wheeler, is called. If it does not get enough sustenance from the two-wheeler riders, it will not discriminate against the worse-than-hapless cabbage seller by the roadside either. It is all in a day's work.
By Harichandan A.A.
Photo: Sampath Kumar G.P.
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Life
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Thiruvananthapuram
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