To
The Commissioner of Police
Lal Bazar
Calcutta -1
Dear Sir,

I know. I know and fully understand that the following facts and factors are not under your control: 1. Despite the Nano Menace having been fought off (the vehicle also known as “moped on four wheels”), motor-traffic in this city has continued to grow like a galloping cancer. Furthermore, despite the old taxis and buses and so on having been collared and neutered, this traffic continues to kill and pollute and deafen at a rate that is probably making your honourable WB Police force a laughing stock at meetings with commissioners of other police forces. For instance, I can see the commissioner of police, New Delhi, crowing to you that he/she deals with eight times more vehicles than yourself but still manages to keep the decibel levels lower than those in Calcutta by about 50 per cent. “My Dear Calcutta!” I can just hear Pol-Comm.ND say, “You people still waste time catching and prosecuting criminals! We just shoot them quickly and concentrate on our main job: traffic, traffic and traffic!” It is unfair, I know, that we in Calcutta are bound by democratic norms not applicable to the Union Terrortory, I beg pardon, Territory. I know you cannot be blamed for this at all.

2. Calcutta has now begun to be placed in the ‘World’s Top Ten Cities Most Unfriendly to Pedestrians’, and it still dissatisfies some people that here we are ranked at No. 5, which is still one behind Delhi. It’s no point telling them that to be so close to the legendary No.1, Los Angeles, or the No.3, Kabul, without the help of either Freeways or Kalashnikovs is a huge achievement. I know the ‘pedestrian menace’ is something a lot of people feel should be totally eradicated and many often take the matter — as in the steering wheel — into their own hands, which again leads to a lot of paperwork at the morgues for your already busy policemen. I know you cannot solely be expected to have control over this: it is also upto the people in government who receive the bribes to say to the bribing party that this or that encroachment, that this or that building-over of so-called ‘public space’, will lead to complications such as pedestrian deaths, something that needs to be avoided till these ‘walking obstacles’ can be legislated out of the city completely.

3. The fact that it is currently impossible to accurately measure either the PLI or the SVCI in West Bengal also cannot be put at your door in Lal Bazar. Petty Lumpenism Index and Serious Voilent Crime Index, to give each its full name, can both only be effectively monitored once the Bawaal Licence has passed completely from one political party to the other; at the moment, with three, sometimes four, parties vying for the licence, that part of your job is tricky to the point of you being paralysed. There are many, myself not excluded, who accept this as an inevitable part of any transfer of State administration. It will clearly take a couple of years before even your most irrational critics can blame the Police in this state for continuing political mob violence and so on, so let’s let that lie where it stands.

4. Moving from the culture of crime to the Crime of Culture, let me state emphatically and clearly that I, at least, do not hold the state or city police responsible for failing to protect Bengal artists who actively choose to go out of the state to display their work. These artists are adults and professionals, and they should know the dangers that go with the job; before venturing out, they should be aware that people outside the state have suffered long from adulterated, toxic, films, paintings, ‘lekha’ and so on, manufactured and exported from here, and general tolerance is low. This does not excuse the recent alleged plot, allegedly foiled, at the National Film Awards jury screenings, where the plan seems to have been to kidnap and incarcerate indefinitely all Bengali males of film-making age. In Delhi and suchlike places, I have, in the past, been mistaken for both a Bengali as well as a film-maker, and I can tell you it’s not pleasant. Having said that, I never expected WB Police, who I think of as ‘my police’, to protect me. That would be akin to expecting the US Marines to protect every American who leaves the United States.

5. At the risk of repetition, dear Commissioner Shaaheb, I do not hold you or your force responsible for lost industry and industrail revenuee, for rising crime, criminal traffic or cultural excesses committed outside West Bengal either by or against the citizens of this state.

However, I must now come to the reason for this desperate letter.

Again, sir, I know.

I know this atrocity cannot have been your idea but, unfortunately, through one route or the other, the trail of responsibility finds its way back to your command post at Lal Bazar. There is nowhere else where it can go.

Upon returning to my residence in the Minto Park area after a few months away from our beloved city, I kept hearing a noise. It sounded suspiciously like a composition titled Für Elise by a composer of German identity, one Ludwig van Beethoven. To be precise, it sounded like a phrase from this composition being repeated again and again, as if a student without any talent was stuck on practising the same coda. The sound seemed to be coming from the direction of La Martiniere Boys’ School, on the other side of the flyover. I wondered why the school felt it necessary to put students’ piano practice on such a loud PA system. I was convinced the irritation would cease once the teacher switched off the microphone, but no such thing happened. Long after dark, the noise continued to be repeated at fairly regular intervals. The next morning, it began at 7 am, long before any student would have entered the school. In the lower traffic noise of the morning, I could hear the ‘music’ being interrupted by what sounded like announcements at a train station, a woman’s voice telling drivers to drive slowly and to switch off their engines at traffic lights. I made my way down to the Minto Park crossing and, sure enough, the offending loop of piano and voice was traceable to loud-speakers placed under the flyover structure.

Now, sir, there are three things I would urge you to consider, perhaps four.

1. Being a Hindi High School boy myself, i.e., from the wrong side of the pond, I can appreciate someone hating La Martiniere with a passion and wanting to damage their students’ concentration. But there are also other schools in the area, with pupils who are innocent. There are old people in the adjacent buildings, plus the rest of us, all of whom put up with one of the worst cacophonies of traffic, now further amplified by the acoustics of the Park Circus-Rabindra Sadan flyover. The noise of traffic is hard to bear but the aleatory nature of the sound allows one to send it into the back of one’s consciousness. This repeating loop on the loudspeaker is a different kind of torture, impossible to ignore or blank out. It is as if the normal fist of traffic noise is now wearing a spiked knuckle-duster.

2. Speaking of torture, yes, I agree it’s time to take the gloves off vis-à-vis the city’s bus drivers. For too long they have sheltered behind the mistaken sympathies of Socialist Sociologists arguing that their under-privileged background be taken into account while weighing up their criminality. Enough, I agree. But to bring in techniques from Guantanamo Bay to bear upon drivers captive at red lights can only be counterproductive. I would wager my last LP of Hemanta Mukherjee that this niggling psycho-aural attack makes all drivers not protected by air-conditioning drive even more dangerously and violently. Please do not forget: the bad Rock and Roll blaring 24/7 at prisoners in Guantanamo led to more terrorism, not less.

3. As you can tell by now, I too share your vision of a pedestrian-free metropolis where only quality cars ply the wide avenues, where no building is older than ten years, where crime is a thing of distant spectacle, i.e., Calcuttans watching the world outside tear itself to pieces while remaining cool and unaffected within our secure municipal limits. This is the city we would (both of us! You and I!) show to the world. And this is exactly where the next problem comes in with the Beethoven loop at the traffic lights at Minto Park. Just as Kishore Kumar or Pandit Ravi Shankar are precious to us, this Beethoven is regarded as a sacred musician by some foreign countries. Driving under the loudspeakers, one or two of their representatives have, by accident, left the windows open in their CD-plated cars. They are deeply offended that a classic like Für Elise has turned into Für Iliish.

While the earlier points may strengthen my case, this last factor will, I’m sure, convince you to act.

Sincerely etc
Ruchir Joshi, October 2009