Please raise your hands to take responsibility

Rains bring Mumbai to a halt. Nothing new in this news. We hear this every year at least once, sometimes twice. There are some spots in the city which are prone to water-logging after every shower and brings unforeseen challenges to all in the city. 

This year we had a few days like that again. I happened to be returning to Mumbai after a business trip earlier this week and courtesy rains and a stuck aircraft on the main runway, a flight of two and a half hours was delayed by three hours. The ordeal did not end there. After landing in Mumbai , we were informed by the hapless pilot to the equally hapless passengers that the airfield was full of aircraft in view of the cascading effect and it may well take some time to find a parking slot. This some time finally became one hour and fifteen minutes and the fact that this was unfolding at the wee hours of the morning added to the trauma.

Heavy rains are nothing new, in a city whose average rainfall is 2metre in a season. Flight and train delays are also nothing new in these times. But the fact is that this airport , which is the busiest airport in the country , is continously operating at 120% of its capacity which no machine, mechanism or system is designed to sustain. And therefore , one incident of a runway closure brings the whole airport to its knees, the secondary runway being far too short to operate all the flights.

A new airport was conceived in 1997. In about 20 years , ie in Feb 2017 the bidder was finalised. The expected completion of this project is anybody's guess. We are sure by the time the work is completed , the infrastructure will be too less for the traffic load.

Successive governments of various political combinations in this country have ignored infrastructure, paying more attention to class, caste, creed, religion to keep people engaged. We aspire to be a modern nation but get stuck in the same loop of self destruction by procastination. Political parties have been talking big before elections and repeatedly under delivering. I would love to see the persons concerned raising their hands and taking responsibility for the lack of accountability that they have been demonstrating for years together.

This day that time !

There are some days which transports you to the past like a memory fly past with such clarity that you wonder whether it is really past or present. There is once such day , ie 17th Sept. 

For some obscure reason not fully understood to me , this day is the fixed day for Vishwakarma Puja in Bengal. Although all the Hindu Gods and Godesses always follow Hindu almanac, this particular God of engineering keeps his appointment day with the mortals fixed on 17th Sept, irrespective of anything else. I have not understood this fixation with the Gregarian calendar, inspite of the dhak and the bhog and the dadhikarma and all else Bong !

Having grown up in an industrial town Durgapur, some 160 odd kilometres from Calcutta, now Kolkata, this day was a special day during my childhood. This was the day we got to see festivities all around, and multiple invitations used to come for my dad and we used to go in tow. This was the day we got to go inside the coke oven/power plant premises and gape in wonder at things which actually were far beyond the childhood brain to comprehend. I recall this day as the day when the evening invite was fixed at one such electrical substation where my father had been attached to for some time , and the folks there never missed to give him an invite till the last year of his employment. We children uses to frolic around in the otherwise sombre substation premises, of course under the watchful eyes of the elders , lest we touch or go near something dangerous. 

Many many years later , having graduated in electrical engineering and then taking up a career in that stream, these equipment are part and parcel of my daily life, but these memories stay etched in my brain as the fragrance of a flower long withered but still lingers in freshness. Now out of Bengal for many years , I try to my best to explain to my daughter the sights and the sounds long gone by. The memory stays afresh while the clock ticks and the years go by, the bad taste in the mouth remains when we hear that most of the industries in that town are past their prime, fallen prey to abject trade unionism and misled ideologies which have not withstood the test of time.

Hope is a real word

Something in me was missing as I had not posted a single post for last couple of years. Whether the reason is sheer lethargy or running for the roji-roti which keeps your passion in the back-burner I am not too sure, but what the heck, its better to do what I want than what I do not !

Lot of things happened in between in this hiatus, with de-mon ( demon ?), GST, blasts , cacophony of phony politicos, booze ban , 500 metre highway, heinous crimes, godmen to say a few.... 

Wonder what has changed in this interim period ? We wait for the acche din as a parched earth waits for the rain, but yet to see the economic recovery hit the ground running. At least do see its not in deep slumber...that is the hope. Hope is a big word and we cling to that last straw in these lacklustre times.