Too many people in Calcutta lack employment or occupation. And on this rests the reputation of Calcutta being a helpful city. At any given point of time, you will find men dangling their legs from the Maidan balustrade and gazing at the couples canoodling on the greens or at women bathing in the Manohar Das Tarag. Such men almost invisibly frequent the streets and bylanes of Calcutta, and seem to appear out of the woodwork when an accident or a brawl takes place, or any form of human misbehaviour is noticed. They are called the ‘public’ in Bengali.

If there is a major accident, one half of the ‘public’ helps remove the injured to hospital, while the other half collects crude implements like iron rods and bricks and goes about damaging as many public vehicles as it can. If the accident is a minor one, the public forms an impromptu court to pronounce judgment and even award penalties. No one is supposed to question its locus standi. But the public has been going missing of late. Tina Mukherjee realized this recently. An elderly man collapsed on busy Bentinck Street some months ago, but with no public to help him, he passed away on the pavement. Has there been a significant rise in the employment rate among Calcuttans recently?

It has been argued that if the individuals entrusted with enforcing law and order did their job, the public could go back to their idling. There is much truth in this. But must we always assume that the public’s intentions are noble? In the small huddles that form every time there is an ‘incident’ on the streets, there is sometimes a more sinister game being played than we can imagine. Caught at a traffic signal at the Minto Park crossing recently, I saw a brand-new Swift being overtaken and stopped by a motorcycle-rider right in the middle of the line of moving traffic. The motorcyclist got down, and without a word, pulled out the owner-driver of the car and started hitting him. A dozen-strong crowd gathered in no time, and some of them joined the motorcyclist in his act of violence. The traffic policeman remained steadfastly aloof. It was difficult to see what the Swift-owner’s fault was, but he could not have hit the motorcycle because its rider betrayed no signs of injury. But the crowd had already decided that the ‘affluent’ owner of the Swift was in the wrong. When the lights turned green for my line of traffic, blows were still raining on him, but, surprise of surprises, the motorcyclist was already pretending to make a move. I could not stay back to watch money being extorted from the car-owner and divided among the members of the ‘public’.

Sreyashi Dastidar

CREATURE DISCOMFORTS

I find fascinating the way people watch captivated when dogs copulate on the streets of Calcutta. Living up to their reputation of being good Samaritans, people will generously vacate a respectable amount of space even on a busy street for the dogs to ‘perform’. Once the spectacle is over, they will shake their heads in pity for the hapless animals, who are such unashamed slaves to their desires, and then disperse reluctantly. The gleam in their eyes and the stupid smile on their faces say that they have savoured every moment of the opportunity to watch something akin to a blue film for free.

The attitude changes drastically when a dog, or any other animal, lies injured on the street. Insofar as the spectacle of an animal writhing in agony is concerned, people tend to take pleasure in it in the same way that they enjoy the scene of two lustily panting dogs. The crowd that collects around a wounded creature will generously offer advice on the best methods of treating it, but will refrain from actually doing anything to help it. I, along with a friend of mine, was once witness to a puppy being knocked over by a running rickshaw. As the rickshaw sailed away, the pup collapsed in a heap on the road with blood streaming from its nose. The bystanders launched into a discussion about the menace posed by reckless rickshaw-pullers while the pup languished before them. The hysterical cries of my friend for help were met with the cold counsel that the mangy stray is best left to its fate.

But for every insensitive Calcuttan, there is perhaps a concerned one. Another friend of mine nursed a dog hit by a taxi back to health. The blithe indifference of the average Calcuttan to wounded animals is not surprising. We, after all, walk with a straight face past meat shops where skinned and bloodied carcasses hang in display. It might be my imagination, but I seem to detect a savage glint in the eyes of men who stand with folded palms around an animal being ‘sacrificed’. It is similar to the perverse flicker in the eyes of men who gather to applaud dogs making love.

Anusua Mukherjee

ON THE MOVE

The people of this city almost lose their character when they step into the precincts of the Metro. The gutka or paan is surreptitiously spat out into the narrow channels of water running beside the steps leading to the counter. Used coffee cups are thrown into large bins, where they are supposed to lie. The queues before the counters are always orderly, although much bile is spent on their slow progress. And there is almost no contest for the seats on the platforms allocated for women, the elderly and the handicapped. The men manage to wrest them.

The seeming order remains undisturbed till one can sense the approaching train. Then all hell breaks loose. The women, denied their platform seats, now wait for their chance to grab the double rows in each bogie that are reserved for them. As for the elderly, they never had a chance anyway. They are at a definite disadvantage when the automatic doors of the train open and the wild crowd surges in, flitting right or left in search of a seat. Calcuttans, famed for their civility and kindness of heart, feel little remorse in pushing aside a slow-moving ‘Auntyji’ or ‘Dadu’ when they are so determined. The little gap between seats, towards which the Dadus and Didas often move with hope, is quickly filled up. The push from seat-seekers at either end is too much to bear for the tender-hearted, who may try to make space for the old hips to squeeze in. If old bones find rest, but in the wrong seat, then it cannot be helped. The urge of a college-going teenager to rest her legs is often stronger than that of a granddad. So he heaves himself up apologetically, and the sprightly figure in jeans quickly takes his place.

There is not much consideration shown for children either, especially those who do not quite make the ‘cut’. So children in sequinned salwars, with smudged kohl and wonder in their eyes, never have a place offered to them, no matter how difficult it is for them to keep their balance and desist from clutching at the dress of the primly-dressed office-goer. Parents, heading back to the mofussil after a trip to Kalighat, with infants on their laps often get a hollering for allowing their child’s little shoes to brush against the clothes of the person seated in front. No one is willing to let go of a seat. City-bred toddlers returning from school have a little more luck. All of them are expected to fit into one seat that might be vacated at times. But they are often too busy with themselves to care, letting matronly figures take full advantage of their obduracy.

Chirosree Basu

A PREMATURE METROPOLIS

In 1965, social scientist Nirmal Bose described Calcutta as a premature metropolis, a city struggling to combine the ethos of a pre-agrarian society with that of an industralized economy. That ethical disjunction is still alive more than four decades later, in the way different classes of Calcuttans engage with social justice. Two recent incidents in the city made me think of Bose’s phrase and the limitations in the image of Calcutta as the kindest, most benevolent and caring among Indian metropolises.

The week before last, Tina Mukherjee, a model, and her friend were attacked by a couple of drunken men at a busy crossing. As they cried out for help, Calcuttans around them stood watching. Perhaps because the incident took place in Calcutta — a city known to possess a conscience — it created a considerable stir. So, is the reputation of Calcutta being a humane city just a myth? Or have Calcuttans become progressively desensitized to violence in the public sphere?

The answers are anything but evident, Calcutta being a city of contradictions. A few days before Tina Mukherjee’s harassment, in Chetla, a mob, consisting mainly of women, had lynched Dom Pradip, a notorious extortionist, who had returned to the area after spending six years in jail. In the heyday of Pradip’s career, when he went about plundering businessmen, raping local women and murdering innocents, the police had routinely failed to do anything to stop his misrule. So dreading his return, the locals got together to ensure justice that has been delayed and denied them so long. Legal considerations had to be overridden by public interest; people stood by each other in a memorable show of solidarity.

So, it’s not as if the city doesn’t come together in times of trouble. Of course, there was a difference between the Chetla incident and Tina Mukherjee’s experience. At the heart of the first was a public interest cause. It was the pro bono publico aspect of the murder of Pradip that justified the action of the women who killed him. Faced with an individual in distress, people clearly lack the courage of conviction to protest. Of course, there is the very real danger of putting your life at risk for the sake of protecting someone else’s dignity. Very often, this fear of getting physically harmed delays, or even impedes, public reaction.

The other factor, of course, is class. Middle-class sensibility prefers the ready and the easy way — of escape — to confronting injustice, laced as it is with danger. The women of Chetla were from the poorest sections of society, which is why they did not hesitate to resort to such an extreme form of collective action in order to safeguard the fundamentals of their lives. As it is, only women, across various classes, and those with little claims to social and legal justice, have the courage to stand up to injustice. The rest are either selectively blind or afraid, and that leaves Calcutta as only a premature metropolis.

Somak Ghoshal

TAKE A CAB INSTEAD

Does Calcutta care? Even a decade back, the question was redundant. From former governors of West Bengal and sometime residents to lay visitors, many Indians swore by the warmth and goodwill of Calcuttans. Today, the question prompts an introspection of sorts in this city of an elusive joy.

Take the millions who commute by that epitome in our memories of underdevelopment — the Calcutta private bus. That a fundamental callousness and a defeatism characterize the Calcuttan today is nowhere more evident. Whether the Calcuttan’s gripes on a bus find a voice or not and whether he lends a voice to someone else’s depend on his mood and energy levels at the beginning or the end of each of his self-same days. Perhaps his historic discontent has finally turned into hopelessness or made way for mere self-interest.

Of course, concern and helpfulness persist. But the city is undergoing a psychological transmogrification under new economic and demographic imperatives. Hence the merely sporadic protests when women are regularly molested or harassed on city buses. One could also thus account for one half of the passengers remaining silent with the other shouting itself hoarse, urging the driver to pull faster or slower, depending on whether the bus is dragging in order to pick up that one extra passenger or whether it is madly racing with a route-brother.

Many commuters still protest when they see a woman being deliberately given a tough time. But it is a matter of no small import that many others sit silent while a few also remark, “Bhir bus-e uthhechhen jokhon tokhon erokomi hobe…oto ashubidha hole taxi-te jaben.” A city that has spent the greater part of its life after independence protesting against everything under the sun appears, at times, to have lost its sense of right and wrong.

Calcutta buses are not kind to the old and the disabled either. Passengers who usually occupy seats meant for the disabled often need to be prodded into giving them up on the rare occasions when the handicapped do get on board. As for the bus ‘conductors’ who would rather drag all pedestrians onto their buses — one evening last month a man on crutches tried to board the minibus I was on at the Mayo Road intersection. At the sound of the conductor’s irritated voice, I turned to see him raise his leg to prevent the poor fellow from getting on the footboard. His final retort was a sharp “Hobe na bolchhi tai hobe na” as the bus sped off.