Our politicians think we need access to Wi-Fi and selfie spots more than better roads, cleaner hospitals or a single decent public toilet
Beautification projects are usually begun right before elections. Representation pic
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Three months ago, a corporator supposedly in charge of the neighbourhood I live in, decided to beautify the place. Nobody knows why. One can only assume beautification was the plan on paper because, as anyone with eyes and a fully-functioning brain will point out at the drop of a hat, what our city corporators think of as beautiful is dramatically different from what most of us perceive it to be. For example, take a look at any of the monstrosities constructed using the taxpayer money at any corner of our once beautiful city.
So, anyway, this particular gentleman — it’s always men because, as we all know, even if women run for elections in Maharashtra, it’s their husbands whose faces appear on the hoardings — decided that what my area urgently needed were road dividers, embellished with large flowerpots. This move was presumably to coerce people jumping across dividers to stop and smell the roses, or give drivers caught in traffic snarls something to look at other than their fellow Indians spitting on both sides of the street.
And that is how the dividers with flowerpots were discovered by my neighbours and I one morning. They were all painted the colour of vomit, and each held a different flower plant.
Would these plants survive Mumbai’s climate? Will they be watered regularly? Were they hardy, indigenous species? Naturally, answers to these questions could be given only by people who have been to school and, as I pointed out in the beginning, this particular plan was conceived because a corporator “thought it up”. In other words, there are no answers to be found.
Less than a week after the dividers masquerading as fancy flowerpots appeared, three were found bent at awkward angles, possibly caused by vehicles or, as is more likely, simply because they weren’t made particularly well. Two dividers had snapped clean off their base, with their jagged metal stalks now posing a different hazard. The plants didn’t survive, obviously. They weren’t watered, obviously. They weren’t meant to be on Mumbai’s streets, obviously.
Earlier this week, the flowerpots were repainted a more ghastly colour than we thought was possible, and a few plants were replaced. I assumed this was done not because the corporator suddenly woke up to find a conscience after decades of living without one, but because BMC elections are just round the corner.
Suddenly, it all made sense. As if by magical means, representatives of political parties — who had spent the last five years avoiding questions from the press, going on ‘study tours’ abroad (interesting, because almost none of them show any proclivity for education in their formative years), or spending time on issues pertaining almost exclusively to the renaming of streets — began issuing announcements and circulars on what they intended to do if we were all stupid enough to allow them another 5 years in office.
Here are some of the interesting additions to the otherwise ancient list of promises they usually trot out like clockwork: Free Wi-Fi zones, selfie points, a gymnasium or two for senior citizens, cycle tracks, CCTV cameras in some localities and free SIM or data cards.
To put it into perspective, individuals who want to manage our city believe that we, the residents of Mumbai, need access to Wi-Fi and selfie spots more than we would prefer better roads, cleaner public hospitals or a single decent public toilet in a city that now resembles a giant toilet itself.
This takes being delusional to a whole new level. What are we to use those Wi-Fi zones for anyway? To log on to YouTube and look at well-maintained roads and hospitals in other countries? What do we do with selfie points when access to those points is stressful, irrespective of whether you choose to go there by foot, road or train? And when was the last time a political party offered a free Wi-Fi zone that actually functioned a few weeks after they got some free publicity for it?
These promises only reveal how disconnected our corporators are from what we really need them to do. It’s why they assume they can win us over with things that simply don’t matter to us on a daily basis. What makes this tragic, however, is that the lack of decent alternatives means we will be stuck with these clowns for another 5 years. Think about that and fake a smile at the next selfie point you visit, will you?
When he isn’t ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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