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World class in making problems for ourselves

I couldn't be happier, I tell you. There's a new mall here in Bombay, a glass-covered paean to glitz near Haji Ali called Crossroads. It has descended on us complete with some kind of department store spelled or misspelled Piramyd, a shop to buy harmon/kardon (no, never Capitalized) audio equipment, Bhandare Oticians (yes, Oticians it is, in the insert I am about to tell you about) and a Food Court (always, but always, Capitalized).

Now all those features, plus numerous others I don't have the space to mention, would by themselves be enough to warm the cackles of my heart. But what has really got me buzzing is a delicious nugget I picked up from the promotional insert ("Crossroads: The Complete Shoppertainment experience.") the mall stuck in The Times of India a few days ago. Here it is, verbatim.

"Inspired by the great Egyptian pyramids," (not piramyds) "Crossroads prides itself as a marvel of designing and architecture like those great Mesopotamian monuments."

I am not making this up. No, because I could not in my wildest fantasies have dreamed up a mall -- yes, a shopping mall -- inspired by the pyramids of Egypt which metamorphose into monuments of Mesopotamia in a matter of a dozen words.

Yes, I couldn't be happier that such a mall has arrived in Bombay. That we in Bombay are now at par with fancy shoppertainment experiences the world over. That we in Bombay can buy under one roof such brand names as Chopard, Armando Luchetta and Dia-aura, no matter that I have no idea what products these brand names come attached to. That we in Bombay now have still another world-class traffic and parking headache to contend with.

You see, Crossroads has hogged the news practically every day since it opened recently. Not so much on account of the pizzazz, but because it has produced massive traffic jams. One reason for this is the state of the road outside -- it is an already congested, heavily travelled artery of the city. Next door is Heera Panna, one of Bombay's erstwhile shopping paradises, now reduced to looking like something of a shabby cousin. But with Heera Panna there, this stretch of road has always been a mess of haphazardly parked cars, cars trying to make U-turns, buses trying to thread their way through pile-ups because of the Haji Ali traffic signal at the end of the road, and hordes of people on foot.

Now there's Crossroads, a new magnet for hundreds of cars. And what do you think the complete shoppertainment experience has done about providing parking for those cars? A lot, yes, but also not a lot. There is parking in the basement or you can "take a hike up the car lift to the panoramic terrace parking lot." (I'm still quoting from that delightful insert). Panorama or not, it's probably a good idea to get to the mall very early if you're driving. A Bombay Times interview with S P S Yadav, additional commissioner of police (traffic), tells us why. Crossroads has provided parking space "only for 97 vehicles. If some adjustments are made, upto 105 vehicles can be accommodated."

Naturally parking and traffic are immense headaches. So much so, Bombay Times also carries a photograph of a chaotic evening scene outside the mall -- cars parked any which way, other cars and buses squeezing through, pedestrians everywhere. The caption says: "As all roads lead to Crossroads ... the area has become a virtual nightmare for motorists." Apparently that wondrous lift is still another major bottleneck. Only capable of carrying a few cars at a time, it leaves more cars stuck outside waiting their turn to "take a hike." Things are so bad that a few days ago, residents of the area held a rasta roko -- they blocked the road that already seems kind of blocked -- to protest against the mess the mall has wrought.

How was a mall this big and this ritzy planned with a mere, laughable, 97 parking spots? How was it allowed to get away with this ridiculous nod to parking responsibilities?

Now this collection of shops is being touted as yet one more sign of Bombay's arrival as an international city with world class things about it. All the glass and glitter persuade us that we do rank up there with the Dubais and Parises and Tokyos, those shimmering visions over the seas. We want to be like them, and we look at Crossroads and can believe that we are like them. In that sense, the builders of Crossroads tap into some deep, long-felt yearning among India's middle-classes.

Why then do such builders overlook something as simple as parking? After all, those other international cities that we long to duplicate do manage to provide their citizens parking too, under or on top or at the side of their shining malls. It's not glamorous, not pretty, not covered in plate glass. But it is a necessity, thus it is built. Why not here? Why do we do so well on the polish, but so ignore the less flashy essentials? The basics?

This curious dichotomy is a pattern that you see over and over again. Take the famous flyovers. Ongoing feverish construction, even as you read this, will bless Bombay with 55 of these. One of the earliest completed was at Mahim Causeway. With much fanfare, it was thrown open to motorists in both directions about six months ago.

The immediate result: utter chaos. Traffic coming off the flyover and hoping to head north on S V Road had to make a 90 degree left-turn and merge with heavy traffic coming from the south. Signs on S V Road to tell you how to stay left to turn onto the flyover ramp were so tiny, it was impossible to read and understand them even if you managed to see them at all. At the ramp in particular, but all around the intersection in general, traffic became a thorough disaster. Less than a week later, the flyover was made one-way. One exit ramp lay disused for months, apart from cricketing urchins, before it was turned into an entrance ramp. Today you can have the singular experience of driving on this flyover over large arrows that point the other way.

Not that making the flyover one-way has lessened the chaos. Still another report in the Bombay Times ("Traffic cops feel the heat as chaos worsens on Mahim flyover", September 8) is little more than a dismal list of problems. The change to one-way traffic has "result[ed] in heavy jams below [the flyover]"; a planned off-ramp "will create criss-crossing" among cars going in different directions and thus the traffic police want the plans cancelled; the on-ramp involves "a very sharp turn and [is] dangerous," and buses take "12 seconds to [make the] turn, causing heavy jams on the ramp."

The whole project, says the report, "expose[s] the lack of coordination between the MSRDC [the agency that built the flyover], the traffic police and the [Municipality]." The same S P S Yadav says: "I do not wish to comment on why [it was inaugurated] as a two-way system."

Now Bombay's flyovers are being held up as a singular achievement of the government we have tolerated for five years in this state. We are told they are yet another sign that we are catching up with world standards. But the one at Mahim, at any rate, seems to have been erected without any thought to the basics: traffic flow studies, easily read signs to direct traffic and the like.

The result, as with the glass-encrusted edifice at Haji Ali: a mess. Every time we get one more of these world-class gizmos, whether it is an airport, a flyover or a mall, what we really get is the same: a mess. And I am not even touching on the utterly misplaced, even criminal, priority in public spending that flyovers in particular are.

It is good to aspire to world standards. For too long, too much that is Indian has fallen well below such standards. But you don't get world standards by simply building flyovers over intersections. Nor by erecting glass-fronted behemoths and selling foreign brand-names inside.

No, you get them by attending to the basics. Instead of that, we have short-sighted, piecemeal approaches to fulfilling those middle-class aspirations. They leave us with bigger problems than we had to start with. World-class problems, in fact.

Dilip D'Souza