Street Smart

A little after 12 in the day,and right at the centre of what looks like a maze of haphazardly stationed buses at Park Street crossing...

If it weren’t for a-word-a-second orators that parties spawn in our city,we wouldn’t know what performing arts was all about

A little after 12 in the day,and right at the centre of what looks like a maze of haphazardly stationed buses at Park Street crossing,it’s incredibly tempting to tweak Kolkata’s favourite cliché in the tail and call it a ‘city of killjoy’. As you fiddle with your phone,crane your neck out of the cab window only to be greeted by colourful posteriors of public buses demonstrating their predilection for misspelled English,and curse all political parties in the same breath,the voice of conscience finds its way to you through the unforgiving August-humidity. Apnara kar shonge? (Who are you with), yells Mr Reality Check. And while you’re still making up a retort in your head,the loudspeakers blare back. Mukesh Ambani,who gifts a Rs 300-cr jet to his wife on her birthday or the farmer who can’t provide a singe meal for his children? he asks. Forty degrees and fifteen minutes of trying to sit idle in a cab,after all,can do wonders for your conscience. And as you try shoving images of a swanky white jet,flutes of champagne and French nail spa,under bouts of guilt,the cab driver and his penchant for expletives comes to your rescue.

The vehicles,you realise,are crawling ahead and your driver,probably ignited by the resurgence of the proletariat heralded by the said voice of conscience finds it necessary to give a chauffeur secured inside his air conditioned car,a piece of his mind. And the car rolls closer to the voice,now strangely similar to how you have always imagined Bianca Castafiore must have sounded. No,there’s not a single starched white kurta to be spotted,nor a band of eager followers huddled around a podium. While the said speaker lashes at Mukesh Ambani’s romantic adventures,his audience is divided into small huddles. Some bent over mobile phones,some over cups of tea,some simply stare back at you,smirking and laughing as you hassled let-the-lightning-strike-you looks.

If you were allowed to sit right in the middle of a busy street,play with your phone and come off alive,you would probably not even want Ambani’s jet. But Mr Reality Check wouldn’t relent. A farmer in Vidarbha,just a few kilometres away from Ambani’s house,right now is handing over a bottle of poison to his wife,and asking her to serve the last lunch the family would ever have… Only we want him to live…, he rattles off. There’s no proof that a unduly prolonged Kolkata summer makes you brittle,especially if you’re born to it,but you’re tempted to ask Mr Reality Check,can he locate Vidarbha on a map? Is drama and speech,the latest antidotes to hunger? Or did he secretly wish he was Amir Khan?

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