“History repeats itself twice, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
In a sense, I was witness to both the tragedy and the farce in the span of a couple of hours.
The scene of the first repetition was the seminar room of Ramjas college where a panel discussion took place on Making Public Space Safe, organised by Jagori. The panellists included Mr. Anil Shukla (DCP, South District), Mr.Anshu Prakash (CMD, DTC), and Dr. Kiran Walia (MLA and Ex Chairperson, DCW). First, I must say the public face of the DTC and the police has been really spruced up. Young, smart, bilingual, they speak a language that is peppered with words like patriarchy and paradigm. And they speak it with as much (or almost) élan as any professor. They can spew statistics with machinegun regularity. The DCP said that the focus was not on moral policing but safety. There DTC CMD gave promises of more and better buses, and more gender sensitised personnel. There was talk of better policing of public as opposed to private spaces, better quantity, quality and design of DTC buses etc. etc.
But behind the assurances and commitments for change, there was ample evidence that not much had actually changed since the time that I used to hop onto U Specials over two decades ago. Buses are still overcrowded, women are still molested with chilling regularity, public spaces like parks are still as unsafe for women, and they are still given the same old patriarchal claptrap about appropriate dress code and behaviour (as a recent pamphlet taken out by a police personnel about women students from the North East proves).
Both the DCP and the DTC chairman reeled off statistics about more personnel, more women recruits in the police, gender sensitisation trainings, and better buses. They also provided some practical suggestions about safety for women students, such as have a ‘Safety Buddy’, not walking behind but in front of parked cars, taking out the keys to a vehicle in advance rather than searching for it at the last moment, and feeding in the ‘Emergency’ and ‘Complaint’ numbers into mobile phones. However, as Mukul Manglik and Dr. Kiran Walia pointed out (in very different contexts) that just not enough assertive action was being taken by these departments. Till this happens, the history and the tragedy will continue to repeat themselves, ad nauseum.
As Marx said, the second time history repeats, it is as a farce. So, now for the farce (if not the history). When I came into college in the morning in a tearing hurry, I found that the college’s parking lot was packed. The moustachioed security head asked me to park outside on the kerb. In response to my question about towing etc, he assured me that it had never occurred before. He also muttered something under his breath about the DCP being there inside. Reassured, I rushed in. When I returned, I found the kerb car-less. On being confronted, Mr. Moustache nonchalantly informed me that the non occurrence of an event in the past was no guarantee of its non occurrence in the future. Such a deep philosophical discourse left me with no choice but to find the police station, pay the fine and retrieve the vehicle.
I found a rickshaw whose puller turned out be somewhat aurally challenged. He kept hearing ‘Crane’ as Train’ ‘and ‘Police Thana’ as ‘Barf Khana’. So till the end, I was unsure of whether I was going to end up in the Metro Station of Barf Khana, or the crane towing department of the Police Thana. Anyhow, I did reach the correct destination and paid a fine of 800 rupees, a steep and hefty sum for a day’s parking! Come to think of it, the incident might have been a farce for everybody else, but it was quite a tragedy for me.
Apart from the panel discussion, the exhibition on masculinities witnessed its last day in the Ramjas College Lawns. Film shows were held at various venues in the three universities. The art show Relocating Masculinities, continued its exhibition of photographs and installations at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
