He is less than nobody. The basic markers of citizenship — name, address and sanity — have fallen away from his present being. But early this week in Calcutta, for about two hours in the morning, he seemed to have found his raison d’être, before vanishing again into the urban millions. This strange man from somewhere in Mullickbazar stood at the crossing of A.J.C. Bose Road and Elliot Road during the morning rush-hour, and expertly controlled traffic for a couple of hours. From jaded taxi-drivers to important police officers, people found themselves obeying the commands of this mysteriously skilled lunatic in his early twenties, with a yellow band around his forehead. The traffic flowed remarkably well under his control, but he slunk away as soon as he was spotted by the constable who, as it were, “took over” from him.

Delusions of control, of possessing the power to turn anarchy into order, is an old form of madness. Dr Johnson’s mad astronomer in Rasselas believed that he was responsible for the weather. But there is a strange pathos in this unhinged and untraceable Calcuttan making himself spectacularly useful, and — what is most important — for nothing at all. There is pathos, too, in the high order of his expertise in what he was attempting, however briefly. And something more than just pathos. It is odd to have to regard as madness the spectacle of a human being wanting to make himself publicly useful in a spirit of absolute disinterestedness. A sense of self-worth is inseparable from such a feeling of usefulness. It is often this feeling that brings out the best in a human being, even when he happens to be not all there. Creatures like this mad constable are part of India’s vast, sad army of the useless. In a country of more than a billion people, it does not require a diehard utilitarian to wonder about the immense waste of human resources when lack of access to the most basic forms of social rehabilitation prevents a huge number of men, women and children from realizing the full potential of their human worth. The unorganized sector has, until recently, been economically and humanly invisible. But outside even this scarcely-noticed sphere of subsistence, lies an uncharted area of unproductivity, whose denizens barely manage to be regarded within the penumbra of the human. Yet, there is often a surplus of energy in this sphere, erupting in forms of “work” that are not quite as disinterested as the efforts of the mad constable of Mullickbazar. Vagrant children swiftly cleaning cars at traffic lights, or sweeping railway compartments, are all trying to invest beggarly wretchedness with the semblance of “work”, for which they then hope to be “paid”. Thousands of undertrials held in jails for years, or children growing up in the states’ observation homes are also part of this pool of wasted energy and resources. Social workers often notice pathological hyperactivity among the latter.

A Calcutta schoolboy had recently made it to the finals of a national Cartoon Network contest by creating Madloo, a madman who thinks he is a traffic policeman. Inspired by a real madman he had seen once controlling traffic in Bhutan, this young animator explains that Madloo “is a very nice man, but when he doesn’t get to eat for days, he goes mad. But it is his madness that makes him happy.”