Ajith Nair

The BEST has introduced a SMART card. The first part is fiction, the second part is plastic. For 1200 bucks a month, the BEST lets you get onto any bus anywhere, any time. Now if they came up with movie tickets like that I know that there would be takers. Nonetheless, the economists of the BEST who also double up as conductors seem to have seen something that most consumers haven’t. Hence the only people who have bought the cards are these people and their kith and kin. At a more serious level, 1200 or even the 800 bucks a month option is simply a big loser to the other 12 rake mammoth that easily picks up 5000 people at a time and deposits them the other side of town in half the time. So what if you get badly crushed and start smelling like sardines….the BEST is not aroma-therapeutic either. And on bad days you could end up having two meals on the bus if not three, given traffic and more traffic. The card is hardly SMART. The conductor has a contraption which still needs to do a steth...

Beggars are as much a part of Mumbai as the Gateway of India. Over the last 10 years of actively roaming around the city, the no of cars have increased and so have the no of beggars. What has also changed is the kind of beggars in the city. The first kind of beggar that I encountered was the simple woebegone face kinds who would sit by the roadside and keep uttering monosyllables the year round. There was no strategy of any kind in place, and the adage beggars can’t be choosers used to get played out. Most of them seemed fatalistic. As the economy evolved and liberalized, so did beggars. For one, I think even the beggar economy opened up. There were a lot many more beggars because there was a lot many more economic activity (and hence money to be handed out) and a lot many more people. The quality of begging also changed. Some beggars, in order to differentiate their pitch, started to exhibit their skills. So you had harmonium totting kids and adults causing disharmony in trains. Strat...