05 May 2014, 06:14 PM IST
What you notice right away when you drive a yellow-plate taxi is the vast variety of law and order and rule enforcing authorities immediately look at the registration plate, and then in an automatic reflex look at the windscreen of the said commercial vehicle to see if they can spot the various coded stickers and colour codes which make so much of free movement of vehicles, goods and people a well-oiled affair for not just the engine but also the assortment of cops, RTO officials, security chaps and touts who are present at every cross-roads, entry / exit point or other locations all over India often known as "points".
You don't learn any of this if all you do is to drive a private car or bike.
A few days ago, I decided to know more about the fascinating world of taxi-drivers on whom so much election psephology is based, and as luck would have it, a railway station drop from one of Delhi's most famous education campuses to the chaos that is the road approach to New Delhi Railway Station and then later in the evening a pick-up from Delhi's magnificent and equally confusing landside approaches of Delhi International Airport's Terminal 3 literally fell into my lap!
Locations and identities and vehicles have been protected as required.
In the first instance, I drove up to the high security gate of the campus that I had been to literally thousands of times over almost half-a-century of life before without being really challenged whether on bicycle, motor-cycle, scooter or car, and was asked to pull over by the security guard. Fair enough, I thought to myself, maybe they need to be careful with taxi operators, but no, surprisingly he had other things on his mind - he wanted to know about the booking details, who had booked the taxi, how much was being charged and also, a straight demand for Rs 20.
When I said what for, he replied, well, if you had booked through the campus people, then you would have paid at least Rs 50 if not more, and Rs 20 would have been our share, so out with it. At that juncture I told him, look, I almost studied here, I know each and every hostel including at one time the girl's hostel which is right next to the gate, I have multiple friends who now teach here or are part of the alumni association, and you need to be careful. He looked at me as though he had swallowed a frog and said something to the effect that if the sahib log will also drive a taxi then what will they do.
I felt sorry for bullying him then and slipped him a Rs 50 note for all the times that they had saluted me when I came there in my otherwise "normal" car, and went on my way, not failing to also notice for the first time that a neat little metal number-plate had been nailed on to each tree and that this was a campus which also had cycle-rickshaws with a neat rate-list pasted on the rear.
And then we reached the New Delhi Railway Station, Pahargunj side, this is on a Sunday morning at about 0645 or so. The sun, as you can see, was hardly over the horizon but beating down hard and bright. And the entry to the railway station drop-off-cum-pick up point was totally chaotic, once we were able to enter after a 20 minute crawl from the road.
I dropped my passenger, linked up with the real driver of the limo, handed the swank buggy over to him, and decided to take a walk back to the station entry point to see what the chaos was about. Immediately, one thing I realised was that this was not chaos, this was planned civil disobedience of the highest sort. Private and yellow plate taxis were parked at the entrance in such a way that of the four possible lanes of entry, only one was open at any given time, forcing everybody into a toothpaste squeeze.
The complete disorder was designed to aim for one result: people trying to reach the station would get delayed outside, miss their morning outbound trains, and then come running back to the same gates to, you got it right, find a taxi to take them to whichever destination they needed to reach. Which, being morning Shatabdi departure time, meant a choice out of Jaipur side, Chandigarh side, Amritsar side, Agra side, Dehradun side and Lucknow side.
Very interesting!
Of course, the law in all its might outside was also part of this. While the law inside was busy trying to impose security measures, which meant catching hold of poor inbound passengers and making them open their bags.
And of course, there was a separate lane from a separate road called "State Entry road", which is for so-called VIPs and VVIPs to catch their trains from, away from the rest of us natives.
Same evening, I was headed towards Delhi's now not so new Terminal 3 to receive a passenger. As things turned out, her flight was 25 minutes early, and so she was already waiting at the arrivals drive-through and pick-up area, she even told me the pillar number she was standing next to, because of which I skipped going to the parking lot and spotting her, pulled over.
The moment I opened the boot and lifted her bags to put them in, a fine gentleman in a uniform that was almost exactly the same as that of our Traffic Police stopped me, and asked me why I was doing a pick up here, and then pulled out one of those new computerised hand-held printing devices to issue me some sort of a ticket.
"What is this," I asked him?
"It is a parking receipt," he told me.
"But I have not used the parking lot," I told him.
"So what, you should have, taxis are not allowed to pick passengers up from here," I was informed.
At which point I switched to English, pulled my camera out and pointed the dash cam at him, at which point he ran away.
The complete wide and open road in India, it seems, is designed to only squeeze everything it can in the name of law and order and justice and much more from taxi drivers. Or drivers of commercial vehicles.
It is going to be fun driving a taxi. No wonder election reporters learn so much from them!
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Elections and taxi drivers - Part II
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