Kings of the Road

Times of India, October 8, 2011



The prize for exclusivity easily goes to the roadways authorities. I shall substantiate the foregoing claim with evidence from one of the model roads in Chennai, since I am familiar with Chennai; and I am sure that the resident of Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, ..., can easily identify the analogous models in her city. Consider what used to be a lazy one-lane road called `Old Mahabalipuram Road' and is now a four lane toll road, re-christened `Rajiv Gandhi Salai' and often referred proudly to as the IT highway of Chennai, owing to its being liberally dotted with blue glass fronted eyesores housing offices of IT giants such as Infosys, Cognizant, Satyam, ....


No stone has been left unturned to ensure that the BMWs and Hondas - not to mention the poor relatives churned out by Hyundai and Maruti - can zip through a distance of some 20 kilometres in half an hour. But this `great progress' has come with a price-tag. Consider the following illustration of what I mean:

• The stretch at the north end of this road (the end closest to the city) has a 3 foot high road divider for a continuous stretch of about 3 km.
• The only way to cross this road is at one of three foot-bridges, each of which involves negotiating about 45 steps, or to take your life in your hands, dash across the two halves of the road and hurdle the road divider mid-way (which option is taken by many people with a death-wish) in between occasional lulls in a traffic averaging 70-80 kmph (in an allegedly 40 kmph zone).
• At the busy `Tidel Park' traffic signal, arguably one of the more crowded intersections of the city, there is no pedestrian crossing, and many roads can be crossed only if you can join a human sea coming out of the train station at the crossing and simply walk across even as another sea of cars and motor-cycles is honking away and trying to cross the intersection when they do have a green signal!
• God help you if you are mobility challenged (as I am), and are not as fortunate as I am to have a car to take you zipping along for anything between 0 and 3 kms, pull a U-turn, and zip along for another 3 km in the opposite direction before you can get off this `avenue of the gods'!

It is as if the rulers of the land have passed a decree that you only deserve to exist or need to go anywhere near this great road if you have the right sort of wheels (under a car rather than a wheel-chair). Many flyovers which were built have simply done away with whatever played the role of a sidewalk, so much so that there are simply no sidewalks. To add insult to injury, on those roads in India which do have sidewalks, motorcycles regularly claim such sidewalks as their own - and the hapless pedestrian has to hop for his life. 


The message to pedestrians is clear; get wheels (of the right sort), or do not use the roads. The corollary for the person on a wheelchair is even more daunting. It is downright scary when you consider the public travel options for such a physically challenged person; forget
the buses, where you have to be a strapping young lad to be able to run after the bus which stops several metres past the bus stop, battle your way through hordes of similarly unfortunate people, and at the end, you might have to hang by one hand from some tenuous
support, half in and half out of the bus. Or the suburban trains, where it is necessary to navigate an overbridge involving around 50 steps, or worse.


What should we do in order to have an inclusive society which recognises the rights of everybody to exist?

Role Models

Times of India, September 24, 2011



More than a decade ago, I once went with my family to spend a year visiting universities in California and Iowa in the US. Upon our return, my brother asked my daughter (now a teenager but only about six years old then) just what she liked about America. Her perspicacious answer was that she could cross the road, and even walk to school all by herself. (You only press a button, wait for the light to turn green, all cars stop, and you can cross the road!) Now I am on the verge of becoming sixty years old, am constrained to become increasingly dependent on a wheel-chair due to a neurological problem, and increasingly find myself yearning for the joy of this wonderful freedom expressed by her.


Can we Indians ever hope to crawl out of the black hole we have dug for ourselves with our appalling lack of civic sense - as witnessed by

• more than 70 percent of our drivers seeing nothing wrong with (i) driving the wrong way on a one-way street, (ii) driving past a red light, and worse still honking at the car in front who prevents them from doing so by stupidly waiting for the light to turn green?
• brazenly getting out of an air-conditioned car, unzipping and urinating on the side of the road?
• tossing waste matter (such as the wrapper of an ice cream cone or an empty plastic bag which once contained potato chips) out of a car window, and in the extreme case, throwing domestic garbage over the wall into the next house?

On a personal note, can I hope to ever again cross a road by myself in my own country? 

Some time ago, I realised that nobody is going to magically bring all this about for me, and decided that as this was a case of `what's good for me is good, period', I would shamelessly utilise such visibility /marketability I may still have as a research mathematician as well as contacts through friends and relatives (I come from a family of respected musicians, scientists - including even a couple of Nobel laureates in physics - and social workers) to apply pressure where it might help in order to improve the state of accessibility and inclusivity in our society. I have been trying the following ploys:

1. Bullying the (admittedly sympathetic and sensitive) Director and Administration of my own institute (IMSc, Chennai) into enabling me to access almost every corner of my institute with such satisfactory results as to cause an Indian friend visiting here from the US to remark on the remarkable level of wheelchair friendliness of IMSc.
2. Writing, as here, and appealing to people's sense of what is right.
3. Making it a point of going in my wheel-chair to various social events and trying to highlight the lack of sensitivity in the construction of our public facilities by making a fuss if that seemed to be warranted.
4. Responding to people who invite me to meetings of an academic nature by saying I will come (with my wheelchair) provided they can personally guarantee that the guest house and venue of the meeting I am invited to will all be accessible.
5. Writing to ministers at both Central and State levels about the need for addressing concerns of accessibility.

I am happy to report that action taken as described in ploy no.4 above has been satisfactorily successful. I have had very positive results in the University of Hyderabad (see the unofficial blog of the VC of UoH) and the Indian Statistical Institute campus in Delhi - with both places having made a few ramps just before my visit there. My conversations with the directors of both IISc, Bangalore and IIT, Madras have been quite positive. In contrast, nothing tangible has yet transpired from ploy no. 5.


While I realise that the magnitude of practical issues needing to be resolved, before anything can be achieved at a national level, is huge, I wish to elaborate on something I proposed to the Union Minister of Urban Development during my last visit to Delhi.


As our centres of learning should be role models for the rest of society to emulate, let us start by making the campuses of all our Universities and Institutes models of etiquette on the road as well as accessibility of buildings: thus, no horns; giving right of way to the smaller vehicle whereby rights of pedestrians take highest priority; making all buildings accessible to the physically (visually, mobility-wise, etc.) challenged.


This article is an entreaty to the Directors and VCs of our Centres of Higher Learning to accept this as a challenge to set their houses in order and set an example.


This suggestion is not unrealistic; our youth are far more conscious of the environment and responsibility to the fellow man than their cynical `elders'. There is a remarkable `Access Audit Report on the International Guest house' under the project `Accessible University of Delhi' by Samarthyam which can be taken as a model of what to do and how to do it. This is an eminently implementable suggestion; maybe our salvation can only come from our youth.

Wheels Within Wheels

Times of India, September 10, 2011

This is more in the nature of an open letter to airlines and airport authorities. As one who must have flown more than hundred times with a request for wheel-chair assistance, I have acquired a motley collection of stories with the common denominator of lack of forethought and planning. Here are a few samples, which I narrate in the hope that some appropriate authority might consider it worthwhile to attempt some concrete steps at implementing solutions to the problems I mention:

• Having been taken in the wheel-chair on the ‘aerobridge’ to the door of the craft , I have hobbled out of the chair, only to be informed - more than once - that my seat was ‘28 (or maybe 30) Charlie’, which required my having to move on my own steam through the length of the aircraft. When asked if they could not seat me close to the entrance, I have received several responses, such as:

1. They do not do so because I would then have to walk the length of the aircraft if I wanted to use the toilet; (I, as an economy class passenger, could surely not expect to use the facility at the front of the craft, since that was reserved for the Business Class clientele!)
2. The seats in the front rows had been reserved for the use of frequent fliers who had tele-checked in and reserved those seats; (silly me for beginning to think that mobility challenged people could expect privileges offered only to people with enough flying miles!)

• Still on the theme of having to negotiate miles between the aisles on their own steam by people (sometimes even not as fortunate as I to be able to hobble the length of the plane on my own steam, albeit with pain and with the help of crutches), I once asked (on a Jet Airways flight from the recently built airport in Bangalore) why they could not have ‘aisle chairs’ (wheel-chairs narrow enough to move in the aisle of a plane) and received this gem of an answer: ‘the onus is on the airport to provide such amenities and the airline has its hands tied’. Why, one wonders, does a newly built airport claiming to have state-of-the-art facilities not consider the need for providing aisle chairs a part of this ‘state-of the-art- character? A paraplegic friend of mine had to suffer the ignominy of being carried like a sack of potatoes in order to move from her wheel-chair to her seat in the craft and kept saying ‘No I do not’ in a frigid tone of voice to repeated questions on whether she would like something to drink; when this query was repeated for the n-th time by a solicitous stewardess, she snapped back ‘And who will take me to the toilet if drinking all these things on offer makes me need to use the toilet? So, NO THANKS.’
• One of my classic experiences involves Indian Airlines flights: on two distinct occasions, after my wife was asked several probing questions regarding the nature, causes, and possible consequences of the infirmity which resulted in my asking for a wheelchair, she was given our boarding passes; and upon reaching the craft, we were guided to seats in the 7th row ; now row 7 was adjacent to the emergency exit, and even an able-bodied person assigned a seat on that row is supposed to have the prerogative to ask to be re-seated elsewhere if he was unsure of coming up with what it might take in case of an emergency! But when I raised this point, the cabin crew told me the staff at the check-in counter screwed up, and I would have to sit in my assigned seat for now and hope they could eventually find another seat to re-seat me after the plane filled up.

As Henry Higgins asks in the movie My Fair Lady while listing

the dangers of ‘ letting a woman in your life’, why is common sense

never even tried?

Questionnaire

Times of India, August 20, 2011



How many times have you:

• seen an elevator with no braille signs marked next to the door buttons?
• even noticed that the elevator you use in your office or apartment complex every day has or does not have braille markings in it?
• noticed whether the edges of steps are made of a different texture than the rest of the step (so that a blind person will know the step is coming to an end there)?
• wondered how hearing impaired students cope with our system of education?
• heard people tell somebody with mobility problems that a distance of hundred metres `is very close by' or that `there are only a few steps' when there is no ramp for easy wheel-chair access?
• seen a lecturer in a class room draw something on the board to explain something, and wondered how a blind student would follow?
• been to a party on a roof-top which necessitates that anyone coming there should climb some twenty steps even after having taken an elevator to the `top floor', and wondered if the plight of the mobility impaired was even considered before either the party or the elevator was planned?
• seen doors that have been fitted which are not wide enough for a wheel-chair to pass through?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind ...