Tag Archives: BRTS

Bad ideas, Debates, Ecology/Environment, Everyday Life, Metropolis, Right watch

On dealing with fuss-tration

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So for those of us who thought that frustrated, naive and aggressive car drivers are a caricature, Hey we at Kafila found one just for our readers.  He is loud, aggressive and fuss-trated as they come. Read on …

The wonderful thing about blogging, I am told, is that it allows everyone to publish their opinions.  At times however, forgive me for saying this, I wonder if everyone should.  My most recent reason for this harsh indictment of the blogging world, is based on this recent post titled “This is what the fuss is about (you twit)”. The title stems from a spot of witty wordplay on one of my recent posts.

The “you twit”, I might hasten to add, is not my addition. it is the author’s impression of my arguments.  While his post is reasonably, if somewhat naively, argued; his frequent abuse stems, perhaps, out of the need to get his blog read. Or maybe it is a style that is much appreciated by his readers.  I will however, thank him for his incisive – if somewhat excessively enthusiastic – critique of my work.

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Metropolis, Scams

So what was that fuss about?

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Pleased with its professionally executed hatchet job on what is probably Delhi’s first real public transport endeavour that incorporates the needs of pedestrians and cyclists apart from bus users, the press seems to have forgotten the BRTS – moving on to search for other programmes to torpedo. But what was the BRTS fuss all about? Read on …

“’Experts’ order serial rape of Delhi Roads” screamed a particularly tasteless headline, in a national paper, of an article that claimed that the entire city shall be subjected to “gang-rape by greedy contractors with the benign blessings of rootless experts and supine babus.” In another widely published English newspaper, the editor in chief spoke out fearlessly against the “brutal enforcement of licence-quota raj on our roads”, denouncing what he saw as the “cynical and expensive exercise in enforcing a new kind of ideological socialism.” In another op-ed carried by the same paper, another piece spoke out against the “elitist” nature of the same project. “The masses want to drive,” noted columnist Saubhik Chakravarthy,” So reducing road space for private vehicles is ultimately elitist.” Judging by the vicious vendetta unleashed by the mainstream press, one would assume that the mild-mannered professors of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, had committed a crime against the state, rather than have designed the latest addition to the city’s mass transit system.

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