City Beat

King for 10 mins

Have you ever felt like the Chief Minister of the state? Spider recently did. While on the daily errand of dropping Mrs Spider at her office one of these days, Spider found to his pleasant surprise the cops and the traffic team, instead of stopping all traffic as they normally do, actually busy clearing the way for him. It so happened that Spider drove, uninterrupted by traffic cops and other commuters anywhere on the way, from the gates of the Chief Minister’s residence to the gates of his office, known to the city as the secretariat.
There were at least five traffic crossings on the way where Spider normally has to wait for his turn to cross while the traffic on the other sides is cleared. But on this particular occasion, he drove past in royal splendour with the traffic on the other three sides looking on helplessly: the Airport gate, Airport Square, Ekamra Square, Capital Hospital Square and the AG Square, the biggest of them all. For once, Spider had the luxury of driving at a reasonable speed on the empty road while the cops kept waving animatedly to stop all traffic that might come in Spider’s way than stop Spider himself. Not once did he have to change gears while covering the nearly two and a half kilometre distance. Spider could hardly be blamed for feeling like the Chief Minister - with the siren-blaring police vehicle at a distance and all the vehicles that followed it, including the real Chief Minister’s car, appearing to be part of his entourage!
It was certainly a welcome change for someone used to being stopped at frequent intervals to ensure the smooth passage of the Chief Minister from his residence to his workplace, both of which unfortunately fall on Spider’s daily route. For about 10 minutes, Spider felt like a king. It is another matter though that he was back to feeling like a commoner once past the secretariat!!

IPL Time

It is that time of the year again. A time when half the nation is glued to the television screen in the evenings; when the popular film channel Max turns a sports channel in the afternoons and evenings for nearly six weeks; when children fight with their fathers, mothers or siblings for the right to the remote; when boarders fight with other boarders (as it happened in Kendrapara recently) for the right to watch IPL and the sports pages of newspapers become IPL pages.
It is also a time when Spider, the self-appointed founder president of the ‘I Hate IPL’ club, scurries for cover for some respite from the damned thing called instant cricket. There is no getting away from IPL though. You are watching a news channel and suddenly the all-too-familiar trumpet playing the IPL signature tune pierces your ear drums. You walk into a shop for something and find the shopkeeper too engrossed in watching IPL (along with other customers) to spare any time for you. You stay resolutely away from the sports pages of newspapers and yet find that IPL has sneaked into the front page, even if only as a picture with a caption. You land at your khati in the evening only to find other khati members animatedly discussing the finer points of the evening’s match. If you think getting into a bar and having a quiet beer is the best way to stay away from IPL, you are hopelessly mistaken. If anything, it is the worst in a bar what with the giant television screen with its surround sound effect, coupled with the high-decibel tipsy talk of fellow drinkers, making it an earful.
It seems The Himalayas is the only place you can escape to for some badly needed respite from IPL!!

Poor Cousins

The new terminal of the Biju Patnaik airport, inaugurated with great fanfare by Union Civil Aviation minister appropriately enough on the legend’s birthday, may well be a delight for air passengers. But it is a real pain in – well, you know where - for those who come to drop or receive somebody, as Spider found out recently. It can get really tough if you have to receive somebody coming on a flight in the afternoon.
For one thing, the parking lot is too distant from the terminal, which means that you have to walk a fair distance under the fire-breathing sun with no respite by way of a roof overhead. For another, there is a hardly a place where you can sit if you feel tired standing on your feet while waiting for the flight to arrive. In the old terminal, one could at least lean on the steel bars. [Some people have even devised a way of ‘sitting’ between the bars.]
Spider does not know if one is allowed to get into the lounge and have a bird’s eye view of the tarmac from the first floor and watch your dear one board the airline bus if s/he is going and alighting from the makeshift stairs if s/he is coming for a fee of Rs 30 or so as was the case in the old terminal. But anxious mothers have a tough time keeping a watch over their departing sons or daughters through the glass panelled doors of the enormous new lounge. Spider could not even find a free drinking water tap.
While no one grudges the air passenger all the amenities and molly-coddling that they get from airport authorities, it is time some attention was paid to those who have the onerous responsibility of dropping or picking up someone. Interestingly, these people far outnumber the passengers in a phenomenon that is typically Indian.

[This city diary was first published in The Political and Business Daily]