And quietly goes the Tram….

The stretch from the bus stop to Taratolla on my way home from work is about 5 kms. A long stretch of tram line from Joka to Behala Tram Depot acts as road divider. Two sets of tracks – one up and down, with swathes of grass [Green in winter, burnt brush in summer and overgrown tangle in monsoons] on either side and in between, where the lamp posts usually are.

8 months of commuting and yet I am constantly amazed at the denizen’s innovative uses of this divider and to their obliviousness to the incredible chaos all around. This stretch of road has possibly the highest density of population, buses, rickshaw, cyclists, pedestrians, jay walkers, police men, pollution – air and noise, in Kolkata at least, if not in the world. [Small mercies that I can strike auto from this list after the 1st August ban on vehicles more than 15 years old]!

Not long ago, just before the elections, I was shocked one night to see a serenely suicidal Agnikanya Mamata Bannerjee hands folded on the tram tracks. It was a lifelike cut out…but it had given me quite a few anxious moments.

A bustling haat springs up on a ½ kilo meter stretch near the bus stop in the mornings. Vendors with veggies spread on tarps, fish seller squatting at huge ‘bontis’ cheek by jowl with florists who sell mostly withered gladiolis, pujor phool, rajanigandha and nursery displaying their wares on mobile bamboo frames strung up with ferns and all sorts of beautiful foliage in pots! The swathes where they sell their wares are not very wide…but they have it measured to the millimetre and neither they nor the customers pay the slightest attention to passing trams.

Of course the overhead electric lines might snap and fall. That has not happened yet and only a non-resident like me can think of something like that.

There are different haats at regular intervals. In the evening, various stretches are converted into open stores selling wooden furnitures, shital pati madur store and on puja eve statues of Lakshmi, saraswati, Ganesh, jhulan [before Rath] and what not. In the evenings of our stuffy, moist, clammy, humid, never ending summers, pajama-panjabi clad oldies hold their evening addas on these swathes, believe it or not. Seated on plastic stools and chairs that they have carted from their homes just off the Diamond Harbour Road, sipping tea from khullars or plastic cups, discussing world affairs and their solutions no doubt, a world unto themselves despite the traffic on full swing on either side.

And amid all this, in all the ponderous majesty carried on from a previous era, quietly goes the Tram.

To have eyes and not to see...

SK, a visually impaired colleague recently had to go to Delhi for a workshop organised by the National Trust and would be returning alone. I had left instructions at both Delhi and Kolkata Airport for assistance to complete all the formalities. He sailed through Delhi Airport. When the flight landed at Kolkata, the Airlines ground staff met him with a wheelchair and insisted that he sit in it.

“Main admi hoon ya saaman”? SK said. “Kya Sir, bathiye…hum aapko aaram say le jayenge”, they said. He protested vehemently saying he was perfectly capable of walking. The staff very good humouredly ignored all his protests and wheeled him to the terminal and through all the procedures and outside to where his brother was waiting.

A funny story? Maybe to us, the so called “non-disabled.” Not, to SK and million others who face similar situations daily. Buses don’t stop for them, an occasional airlines have offloaded them, people don’t have the patience to stop and listen to them, don’t see them, don’t want to see them, pity them and dismiss them with at best, a “poor thing”. Them being Persons with Disabilities (PWDs). So many such discriminatory incidents from the highly offensive and insensitive to the downright ridiculous.

The ground staff just took it for granted that being disabled, he wasn’t capable. Of anything, at all. He felt very humiliated at being forcefully made to feel “incapable”.

For the vast majority of the non disabled, who normally don’t face PWDs very often, don’t know what to do or how to behave when they meet one. Either they leave it at “Poor thing” or lend a “helping hand” – one which is more disabling than enabling.

It’s Ok if one feels awkward with some one’s disability, if faced with it for the first time. What is not OK is the disregard or unawareness of the fact that a PWD is a person first – who can do some things and can’t do others, just like all of us. SK manages our NGO’s Braille printing unit along with working with visually impaired children in the villages of South 24 Parganas. He is perfectly capable of walking and negotiating his way through the crowded streets of Kolkata, using public transport and goes on frequent out station trips. He can speak, walk, talk, feel, hear and has emotions like all of us. And like all of us, he has a list of cannots. He also can't see.

While it is true that the ground staff meant no disrespect, and out of ignorance, equated disability with a wheelchair, which was of course taking things to ridiculous heights, this behaviour is indicative of the general apathy regarding PWDs and their dignity, their rights who are aftarall like us, citizens of an Independent Democratic Nation.