Post-dated, of course. We have moved to our new office, mall-like, with glitzy floors, fake palms, Ally McBeal-style loos. Open studios. Just getting to work in NOIDA is a whole paradigm shift from reaching the old office at Jhandelwalan Extension. This is the new economy. There you could splutter to work in an auto, holding your nose past the garbage bin, hopping over stray streams of water across the road and swatting flies at the neighbouring dhaba.
But here. We roar over the Delhi-NOIDA-Delhi toll bridge, vast expanses of land on either side, high rises a clump in the distance. Huge office that resembles a mall. Very 21st century and somehoe it seems an incongruous setting for journalists; doesn't fit the traditional jhola stereotype! Our bags, for one thing, are too big for the locker space.
Last week, working on a story on how huge flyovers and other "modernisation" schemes actually impact cyclists who struggle to climb them or pedestarians who find themselves deprived of a crossing, I met an NGO which works with urban planning.
"The Metro, for instance," said P, "is just servicing a tiny percent of Delhi. It's mainly for the new economy ." He says this with some distaste. "The next phase will service NOIDA and Gurgaon... the people who would have taken cars into work. What about the people who work to build the metro?"
It's true that the entry into Delhi from Gurgaon or NOIDA could get jammed in the coming years, as more multinationals set up shop in the cheaper outskirts, building up the pressure on the link roads. But this focus on our metros' (not just Delhi, but Bangalore and Bombay as well)image calling it the "people's transport" is costing more, says P, than what it would have cost to rehaul the bus transport systems which is really the transport of the people. A metro will take you between two areas but it's the buses which take you exactly where you want to go. And so it's the buses (un-cool, old, rickety) which are really the transport of the future. And the "people".
