I welcome the move of India Rail to decongest railway
platforms. They are moving to remove a few iconic Book Stalls from the
platforms.
I wish them luck. We however get conflicting signals from other areas. For example, Airports , particularly, the new and swanky ones, are keen on giving a shopping mall feel to the passengers after they have had their security check. Once they are in, they browse books; break bread, some try new pairs of shoes; pick up new vanity bags. The kids accompanying parents soon get lost in stalls selling toys. Unlike the railway platform , the customers in the sprawling malls, close to the departure gates, mercifully, have no crowd that comes to see off the boarding passengers.
India's trains on the platforms waiting for the green flag signal of the Guard, keep holding in different coaches a large number of non-travelling well wishers of boarding passengers who cause inconvenience to genuine passengers but they hang on till the last moment. Even a few wait longer , and choose to slowly get down only after the train has started moving.
I am for decongesting--- be it railway platform or sewers of my town-- even though in Indian context this attitude looks a bit bold and is likely to cause excitement with overtone of resentment. We, however. need to appreciate that decongesting efforts have succeeded at many places and have made our country look just fabulous at these places. You may remember the famous Jama Majid of Delhi before and after decongestion. Experience the Heritage Walk in Amritsar; spend sometime on the Sabarmati River front, experience the Eternal India on the renovated ghat of Varanasi. You will realise the refreshing change decongestion has brought about.
Congestion, by and large, is the outcome of greed-- when a few grab a common asset for exploitation. Through decongestion do we restore its glory, improve its accessibility and empower it to bestow its charm on everyone.
On the flipside, decongestion is an activity I would assiduously plead for to sweep the cell-phone universe as well. Here the drive has to be two pronged. We must make homo-sapiens realise that it is absolutely safe for a human being to live with one phone only. A monogamous discipline (between human and phone) would hopefully contain the number of phones in the world. The other area needing decongestion is the body of a smart-phone itself. The device has lost its simplicity long ago. It has become a versatile computer. An elaborate phone today has been fast transforming human beings to machines. We must stop this. Our efforts should be to transform it again to a simple and austere phone; light to carry, sweet to talk into, sweeter still to listen into.
I wish them luck. We however get conflicting signals from other areas. For example, Airports , particularly, the new and swanky ones, are keen on giving a shopping mall feel to the passengers after they have had their security check. Once they are in, they browse books; break bread, some try new pairs of shoes; pick up new vanity bags. The kids accompanying parents soon get lost in stalls selling toys. Unlike the railway platform , the customers in the sprawling malls, close to the departure gates, mercifully, have no crowd that comes to see off the boarding passengers.
India's trains on the platforms waiting for the green flag signal of the Guard, keep holding in different coaches a large number of non-travelling well wishers of boarding passengers who cause inconvenience to genuine passengers but they hang on till the last moment. Even a few wait longer , and choose to slowly get down only after the train has started moving.
I am for decongesting--- be it railway platform or sewers of my town-- even though in Indian context this attitude looks a bit bold and is likely to cause excitement with overtone of resentment. We, however. need to appreciate that decongesting efforts have succeeded at many places and have made our country look just fabulous at these places. You may remember the famous Jama Majid of Delhi before and after decongestion. Experience the Heritage Walk in Amritsar; spend sometime on the Sabarmati River front, experience the Eternal India on the renovated ghat of Varanasi. You will realise the refreshing change decongestion has brought about.
Congestion, by and large, is the outcome of greed-- when a few grab a common asset for exploitation. Through decongestion do we restore its glory, improve its accessibility and empower it to bestow its charm on everyone.
On the flipside, decongestion is an activity I would assiduously plead for to sweep the cell-phone universe as well. Here the drive has to be two pronged. We must make homo-sapiens realise that it is absolutely safe for a human being to live with one phone only. A monogamous discipline (between human and phone) would hopefully contain the number of phones in the world. The other area needing decongestion is the body of a smart-phone itself. The device has lost its simplicity long ago. It has become a versatile computer. An elaborate phone today has been fast transforming human beings to machines. We must stop this. Our efforts should be to transform it again to a simple and austere phone; light to carry, sweet to talk into, sweeter still to listen into.
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