Bare-arm driver holed up in an antique piece, called bus [Picture source]
Kolkata’s public bus drivers are totally different species that have very few parallels. They are human like any of us when they are not driving. They become inhuman when they sit behind the steering wheel, and while being there, their concern for fellow human lives altogether vanishes.
Road accidents occur fairly frequently, most of which are because of rash driving by the drivers of mini-buses and boxlike blue ‘private’ buses. They rule the road, run at breakneck speed when it suits them, stopping anywhere and everywhere, and in doing so treat cars and pedestrians with utter disdain, as if they ought not exist on the face of earth.
Even the state buses run the same way, even worse in many cases. One wonders how these men would be like at home with their loved ones. I recall a poignant incident some months back I heard from an acquaintance (let’s call him X).
One morning, out on brisk walk, X was passing by a motley gathering of parents with their wards at a swimming session for kids. Among them, a father attending tenderly to his son, looked vaguely familiar to X. They exchanged glances and X moved on.
It later occurred to X that he was the same man who some days back, driving a private bus had hit a cyclist while trying to overtake another bus from the left near Park Circus where X had gone for some work. It was an outright negligent driving, and the man fled the scene after the incident.
X was very close to where this happened, and upon seeing him that morning with his son, it dawned on him that even a demon-like bus driver has a life other than mowing down people mercilessly.
Next morning, X met them again. He walked up to the man and asked if he could recall the accident at Park Circus that X happened to see. The man, ashen faced, almost contracted into a shell, guilt written all over his face. His son, a small child, looked nonplussed, knowing not what made his father so sick, staring in turn at X and his father.
X left them there, never to see them again.
But perhaps all is not lost. Hope is still there, even if it’s just a flicker. Amid life-threatening bus driving, rare are instances when bus drivers, human as they are, do indeed care for fellow human beings.
2 such caring CSTC drivers, Bikash Roy and Mrinal Kanti Dutta, were recently felicitated by CSTC as this story tells us.
May the tribes of Bikash and Mrinal blossom and flourish.
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