A joke in a Tamil film of the 1960’s goes like this… A tinpot dictator seized power in a Tamil state and surrounded by his henchmen was distributing loaves and fish… One of them protested and asked to explain, the man blurted out, “Ayya, idhu enna anyayam. Ninga vaa sonnal vandhen, po sonnal ponaen. Anal enakku onnum Illaya?” (Sir, what kind of justice is this! Whenever you ordered me to come, I came. Whenever you ordered me to go away I went. Don’t I get anything?”).
The tinpot dictator glared at him, “It is a question of ‘poharudhu’ (going) and ‘varadhu’ (coming). You shall be my ‘Pokku Varavu’ (Transport) Minister.” The satisfied man happily went away, the new Transport Minister of the region. Of course the joke is more effective when spoken in Tamil.
Well, that is transport for you. Not a glamour portfolio, not headlines making but if you can operate it successfully, you are in for lots of moolah. The Civil Aviation bloke can reach for the sky merging or demerging local airlines with international ones, buying aircraft when they are not needed and distributing lucrative routes to rivals, all for a price. But the king of transport is on the ground, the rail and road affair which need two ministers. One of them, the Railway Minister can become a national figure because the trains carry the largest number of passengers. Let me admit it, the Railway Ministry has a special glamour. The man in charge can even present a budget of his own. The railways carry a sense of history. Many of the Indian railway stations and even trains absorbed this sense of history. The British regarded the building up of Indian Railways as one of their major achievements in the Raj. And deservingly so! Many of the British rail enterprises found a place in the Empire building and English fiction. Bollywood was not far behind. In my school days, I enjoyed watching movies like ‘Bhowani Junction’ starring Stewart Granger and Ava Gardner. Of course, Agatha Christie missed travelling by Indian Railways, otherwise we would have had a spine chilling mystery ‘Murder on the Frontier Mail’ or ‘Mystery of the ‘Blue Mountain Express’ which would have beaten hollow her book ‘Murder on the Orient Express’.
Hollywood used trains for portraying romance and Bollywood followed suit. The train was effective in scenes where the hero standing on the edge of the coach of an about-to-speed train gets reunited with his beloved. Hollywood director Billy Wilder first shot such a scene in ‘Love in the afternoon’ (Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn) and Bollywoodwallas copied it in movies like ‘Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge’ and few others.
Indian transport scene gave us outstanding personalities and we are waiting for our films to showcase them. Former Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav became a national hero, by not raising fares for years at a stretch and his rail management was acclaimed even by management institutions. His successor, Mamata Banerjee, ran the Railways without ever visiting the Rail Bhavan in Delhi. One of the earlier railway ministers, the fiery trade union leader George Fernandes became immortal by linking Indian Railways with dynamite, but fortunately his tenure was short.
Road transport was a poor cousin. It had to be thanks to the kind of roads India has. However, ‘Dhabas’ in Punjab became famous for the delicious fare they offered on highways for bus passengers and truck drivers, and we became familiar with ‘sarson da saag’ and ‘makki di roti’. The truckers were a luckier lot. Unlike the train chaps they could swig liquor whenever they wanted to, halt their vehicles in villages and chase the local belles though and at times this would lead to disastrous results. Of course when the trucker was someone like Dharmendra the story would end like ‘All Is Well’. Hopefully Indians will learn to appreciate transport better in the days to come and clamour for the transport minister portfolio.
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V. Gangadhar
The writer is a well-known satirist.[/column]