The world of transportation
By: K S S Pillai
Transportation, like all other fields, has undergone vast changes. The present trend is to use electric vehicles instead of petrol and diesel-driven ones. Though their cost is high, banks are ready to finance if they are certain of timely repayment.
Despite people facing problems of recharging and accidental fires in which lives are lost, their popularity is surging. Steps are being taken to ensure that there is a sufficient number of charging points. Some governments are toying with the idea of denying fuel to old petrol and diesel vehicles to encourage a changeover to new entrants.
The profusion of vehicles has also caused some anxiety. Minors not legally eligible to drive vehicles speed through the city roads, killing people. Most houses have more than one vehicle, each member taking a separate one to the workplace, unmindful of the pollution and other problems caused. Even mechanised wheelchairs are becoming popular, enabling the handicapped to travel on the roads without assistance.
These changes remind me of how we moved from place to place when I was a child in my village in Kerala.
Even bicycles were rare in those days. Only the rich had them with headlights and tail-lights powered by a dynamo attached to them. No one was allowed to ride a bicycle at night without these lights. A licence, renewable every year, had to be obtained from the authorities if one wanted to use these vehicles. Motorcycles were rare, owned by a few super-rich. The case of cars was more so.
The village roads were sandy. People walked through them barefoot, sometimes running from spot to spot when the sand was hot. During heavy rain, streams of water flowed through these roads, requiring the road users to be careful.
There were no tarred roads, and the main one that ran through the town, connecting the nearby places, had a metal surface. Small four-wheeled buses, government-owned and privately owned, carried passengers through these roads.
Kerala has several rivers. There were no bridges over most of them. Buses carrying passengers used ferries to cross rivers. Even though the distance between two places was short, the journeys took much time due to the ferries.
Passengers were asked to disembark and wait while the bus got on the ferry. When it reached the other bank, they disembarked first and waited for the bus. There was a scramble to grab seats when it reached the other bank. It was free for all, and those who failed to grab a seat continued the journey as standees.
There was a mechanised boat service to the main cities. There were no school or college buses. The rich had their bullock-driven decorated carts with a driver. The cart and the bullocks looked beautiful. The bullocks’ horns were painted in bright colours. Some living near rivers had a covered country boat with a man to navigate it with a long pole.
Many people of Kerala had gone to other corners of the country and even outside in search of jobs. The long-distance travellers used trains to travel. Short-distance trains ran over meter-gauge railway lines, and broad-gauge lines connected big cities. One had to change trains several times before reaching a big city. To travel to Delhi from south Kerala, one had to get down at Cochin and catch a train to Madras. From there, he would get on a train for Delhi. As there were very few reserved compartments, one had to grab a seat with the help of coolies, who used to go to the yard, where the train was being readied, with a towel of the passenger, and ‘reserve’ a seat for him by spreading it over the seat.
People usually travelled in third-class compartments. There were no cushions over the seats, and the compartments were overcrowded, with people sitting near the doors and sometimes inside the toilets. Many lithe passengers entered and exited the compartments through the unbarred windows. Most passengers carried their drinking water in small mud pots. Once the water was exhausted, they would rush to the pipes supplying free drinking water as soon as the train stopped at major stations.
With all the facilities made available by modern technology today, I shudder to think of the past travelling.
(The author is a retired professor of English. A regular contributor to ‘The Kashmir Vision’, his articles and short stories have appeared in various national and international publications)
