Fast cars, big cities

The private automobile has joined cable TV in ruining civic life in India’s big cities

Vikram Bedi Delhi

To be automobilised in a grand enough way is now a universal aspiration among us, the Indian middle-classes. The automobile is so much more than a functional means of mobility. It has become essential to the equipment of self-esteem. Among the upper classes, the car is fetishised as much as bodily appearance. Like jewellery and clothing, the values and pleasures associated with age, sexuality, globality, class status and individuality are condensed into the automobile. Private mobility is an end in itself, youthful, erotic and enchantedly modern. Accordingly, whenever we head off into the wider, public arena by design-intensive motorbike or car we are performing our would-be grandeur, our rhetoric of the self.

The urban drama/dance made possible through mobility in public (and so celebrated by urbanists) is now less about limited bodies than about its aggressive, metallic costume, the private automobile. The roads of metropolitan India have become war-zones, where everyone objectifies both himself and all others (including the law), unequally. Big, sleek sedans may too easily intimidate mere motorcyclists but there is the revenge of the weak: they can wade through traffic whereas big cars are immobilised. Walking or cycling in the city is now much too risky. Thanks to “traffic decongestion” measures and the automobile’s impatient will-to-flow at high speeds, the cyclist, never mind the pedestrian, is a lowly-rated citizen. 

India’s cities have become even more historically hybrid: the age of the cyborg is in the temporal mix too. Prosperous young men talking into their “hands free” phones as they drive their new models, feeling proudly up-to-date and free, are a common sight. The shiny new IT-enabled car with religious markings is a prime symbol of our enchanted new commercial post-modernity.

And so, in big-city, middle-class India developmental grandeur is measured foremost by governments’ ability to six-lane roads, to build flyovers and bypasses. There is much indignation about their inability to keep up with rising automobile aspirations. Never mind the well-known costs. The illusion of cars as fun, convenience, and modernism has to be sustained, no matter what.

Roads have become the pre-eminent public spaces/arenas of India’s large cities. But, unlike previously dominant forms of public spatial engagement (bazaars, trams and parks), which were civilising, roads are aggressively unequal. Each of us is focussed on his spatial end-point; each is withdrawn, cocooned in by air-conditioning and the car-stereo. Our fellow citizens are only capable of interrupting the serene and self-absorbed progress that we all so desire (or are taught to by advertisements and by the cars themselves.) Our roads, however roomy, are simply too atomised to carry the civic weight of  “public spaces”, which are about dialogic encounters with strangers,  civic friendship, restrained contests, not indifference or war. True public spaces are about friendly friction (public transport) not abrasion. Automobilisation on this scale, then, is corrosive of the civic, in severe deficit as it already is. Like cable television, it further fragments and privatises the urban community.