Sachin Tendulkar, Motorists And Jaywalking
By Vidyadhar Date
18 April, 2013.
Countercurrents.org
Sachin Tendulkar, the sports super star, is not very popular among his neighbours ever since he moved to his expensive but tasteless looking mansion on Perry Cross road in Bandra two years ago. Even young fans in the neighbourhood are disillusioned, saying we have not even seen him all these days let alone met him. He stays behind his fortress, invisible, avoiding any contact, even a glance on the road That is not how one deals with fans and neighbours. Even Amitabh Bachhan and Shahrukh Khan sometimes meet fans, give autographs.
Tendulkar had become unpopular long before moving in. The construction of his house and the deep digging underground for his car parking and other amenities created such a monstrous noise that a number of residents were forced to approach him with a strong complaint. Every one feels alienated. The whole system works for him and the elites, not for common people. A tree was uprooted in front of Tendulkar’s house recently to make way for an electric installation on the road to provide him assured power supply. A lovely heritage bungalow was pulled down to make way for this new mansion, which may be luxurious inside, but is extremely dull in its exterior and has a very hostile relationship with the road outside. It was a solid bungalow, a neighbor recalled, so strong with thick walls, it was quite a task to pull it down.
Quite a pity considering that I knew his father, Ramesh, who was a poet and a simple man who had no use for the culture of money, high living and accumulation that his son represents.
But this is not what brings me to the theme of Sachin Tendulkar. The point is that Tendulkar, the representative of fast, ostentatious cars and a culture of Ferrari and Formula 1, drives his super fast cars on this road and for ordinary people there is not even an inch of footpath.
That is the level of of our car-dominated culture..
Earlier when he stayed in another building in Bandra , where Aishwarya Rai was a resident, he wanted a special road to be built for him so he could zoom straight to the Bandra sea link or the flyover. And he is now a member of Parliament and yet he has no thought for the common people that there is no space for people to walk on. So, all the mobility for people like him and none for common people ?
A vicious mindset promoted by the car lobby through sustained pouring of money into the media and manipulation of popular thinking seeks to blame common people and insultingly call them jaywalkers. Motorists may not be aware of this but the word jaywalker was deliberately promoted in the West to justify motorists’ crimes and humiliate common people as law breakers . A lot of research exists on this subject but remains unknown to most people. Research in several countries shows that areas legally marked for pedestrian crossings are the unsafest for pedestrians where cars routinely hit them, attack would be a more appropriate term considering the disdain with which many motorists view common people.
So pedestrians are unsafe at pedestrian crossings even in a space legally meant for them and elsewhere they are called jaywalkers, illegal, encroachers. So the most generous presumption on the part of the anti pedestrian system is that the walker should be there entirely at the mercy, at the pleasure of the motorist. The vicious mindset flows from the American pattern and this is what our elite loves while it blissfully ignores the much more democratic traffic model of many countries in Europe.
There is a very decent new facebook group called SOOR (sanity on our roads), started by lawyer Armin Wandrewala which seeks to inculcate more decent behavior on roads. But such good motorists are in a severe minority.
It is easy to blame pedestrians. A lot of motorists feel that that pedestrians are indisciplined and this issue should also be highlighted.
O.K. But considering the huge odds against them, pedestrian indiscretions are extremely insignificant. Let us see the reality . Let us start from one of Mumbai’s elite areas, Pali Hill in Bandra , home to numerous top people including union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde, Maharashtra’s industries minister Narayan Rane, and member of Parliament Priya Dutt, daughter of film stars Nargis and Sunil Dutt. Walk on this road from Mr Shinde’s building, walk whichever way you want, down the slope to the sea side to Carter road, towards Pali Naka or Khar. Wherever.
Whatever you do you will be coming in the way of some vehicle or the other and will be treated by the anti people establishment as a jaywalker.. That is because there is not footpath of any kind. I have walked here to go to the house of poet Gulzar and others and each time I feel like an intruder, the whole atmosphere is extremely unfriendly, you feel unwanted. Streets, footpaths need to have a friendly relationship with the built environment. That is totally lacking in many areas in Mumbai.
It is worse on the parallel road. No footpath here as well and this road carries heavy traffic. And the bigger irony is that it is named after Dr Ambedkar. This is ironically because a road named after the top dalit leader is so hostile to ordinary people. This is a busier road and narrower and this makes it extremely unsafe.
Similar is the scenario at Malabar Hill, Cumballa Hill and Juhu , again celebrity and high priced areas. Try walking to Prithvi theatre at Juhu. I walk all over and that way one gets to understand the city, read it much better. It is almost as if there is a deliberate design to keep ordinary people out of the view and way of rich motorists.
And yet, when a pedestrian is brutally hit by a car, we constantly hear cries like `the pedestrian came from nowhere.’ The whole idea is to blame the victim. It is an old game, just like blaming women for rapes and blaming the poor for poverty. The phenomenon of Blame The Victim is well documented in an acclaimed book of the same name by William Ryan and published in 1971. So the game here is rob the pedestrian of space to walk and then insult him or her as a jaywalker.
Mr Ratan Tata recently said in a media interview how he enjoys going on drives along Marine Drive just for fun in one fancy car after another from his big collection of cars. Yes , fine. But try walking from Talk of the Town restaurant, cross Marine Drive, and go to the footpath. And come back. It is a hazardous, life threatening journey. And this brings us to another point. Many car trips are absolutely unnecessary, the distance can be easily covered on foot or by an auto rickshaw or a taxi. But ego, not travel is the main problem here.
Facilities for pedestrians are better even in countries like Mozambiaque, Myanmar or Mauritius, asserts Mr P.V. Indiresan, former director of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai..
Vidyadhar Date is a senior journalist and author of the book Traffic in the era of climate change..
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