It was after midnight. The car spluttered and stopped. The driver tried to restart but it made weird sounds and stayed put. We were somewhere on the Ring Road in Delhi and as I stepped out of the car I suddenly felt the dark and the night like never before.
The hours that followed were nothing short of a nightmare. A call to Hyundai Emergency told me that since my car was out of warranty I was not entitled to roadside assistance. The 3G, as usual, was playing hide and seek.
Some car helpline number I tried, offered to tow the car but repeated four times that I will have to pay Rs2000 upfront, which I did not have at that point. We some how managed to reach the over-heated car to the DND toll road. Now I must have contributed lakhs of rupees to the coffers of the Noida Toll Bridge Company in the decade that I have lived the other side of the Yamuna, but at that moment at the dead of night, at my most vulnerable I was told they can’t do much to help.
The helpline number one of the guards gave me was answered by a very savvy voice that told me in fluent English, all they could do was get their crane to pick up the car and dump it off the toll road. It was any woman’s worst nightmare come true.
Next morning I woke up to a news tucked away inside my morning newspaper of a chef of a five star hotel in Lutyen’s Delhi injured badly by a stray manjha (sharp kite string) as he was riding his bike returning home at night. He said he asked for help but no one stopped. He was bleeding profusely and was dizzy… but of course, no one stopped.
Increasingly, the sense of civic isolation is becoming a frightening reality in our country. We seem to have little sense of community or national pride and belonging. We are so busy fighting our own daily battles, struggling with harsh realities and, trying to just survive that any other sensitivity becomes remote: massive traffic jams, garbage pile ups, safety issues, trust issues … hardly leave space for normal human responses.
The most wonderful aspect of India has always been family and community —we may find them nosey, sometimes overbearing, even interfering but we always found ourselves around family and friends and neighbours and plenty of people. But now, I wonder?
One-third of the country’s below-35 people feel more comfortable socialising online than in real life, indiatvnews.com quotes a survey as revealing this point. As many as 70 per cent of the respondents in Bengaluru and 43 per cent in Mumbai said they get to know about the lives of their friends and relatives mainly online. When it comes to children, 53 per cent Indians said that their wards needed coaxing or took very long to make new friends.
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