The Useless Bridge

As bridges go, this one isn't much to look at. It's a dingy, covered bridge made of iron and it spanned across one of the most crowded roads in chennai, the Nungambakkam High Road. This lump of metal stands right next to my office so it is hard to avoid. A few days after I joined my company I was going for lunch with a colleague, I asked her if we should take the bridge and I was promptly told that it was crazy to walk all the way up and over to the otherside in the Chennai heat! The bridge, she said, was useless. People apparently would rather risk being runover by a large city bus than to take a bridge to cross a road, thats just the way it is. We Chennaiites who find the stock market too risky apparently seem to think nothing of a walk across a road filled with hurtling vehicles of all sizes.

I too feel into a pattern of crossing the road, risking life and limb everytime I did so. Every once in a while though, I would stop near the bridge thinking if I should climb it, then eventually giving up the idea and risking the oncoming traffic. One fine evening I finally decided to give this seemingly useless bridge some business. I approached it in the darkness and climbed up. I had assumed that there wouldn't be anyone there, I was wrong. There was a gentleman, apparently homeless, sitting there in the landing, with a few large wooden boxes around him, he looked up at me when I walked past him. I don't know who was more surpised, him or me. Then when I reached the top of the bridge, I suddenly realised that the bridge was occupied by more than two dozen people. They were bunched in groups of 4-5, sitting there in the near darkness and talking. Realisation stuck that these groups were actually families who were using this bridge as their home.

Boxes were neatly stacked on the sides, children were running around or sitting on the side of the bridge watching the traffic. The menfolk talking in corners, the womenfolk preparing dinner.

As I crossed family after family, I could sense everyone's eyes on me as I navigated through the pathway. Somehow I felt that a banker slinging a bulging briefcase was a regular sight there. Actually, not everyone was looking at me, the kids were sitting on the sides of the bridge, their legs dangling mid air, through the iron work on the side of the bridge. These kids were seem to be transfixed on what appeared to be their regular evening activity, traffic watching. I felt more and more guilty since it felt like I was passing through someone's living room without their permission.

It was sad when one realised that all these folks had in their lives were there in those wooden cartons. I was thinking about the great advances our country has made over the last few decades, I really can't help but feel that we have left a large chunk of the population behind. Rising land prices have ensured that in the city, to own home you really have to have fairly large resources or atleast you need good cashflows that a bank can lend against. Over the years as we have been beating our chests about how much we have grown as a country, we seem to have left a lot of our countrymen and women behind.

The homeless in the roads, the small buisnesses that have shut due to competition from larger companies, the farmers who have been forced to sell their lands due to rapid urbanisation, effects of our growth are plenty and are all around us, if we choose to see them.

I know there are no quick fix solutions for the plight of the homeless, so if we can't build them homes to live in, lets atleast build more such ugly 'useless' bridges.