Delivering Safety:
A Musing— % &It's 1.30 am. You're driving back home on your motorcycle through the cool and windy roads of Bangalore. The city seems to have folded in a third. What would take an hour in the day is now barely 20 minutes. It is the only time when Bengaluru streets are bare—you can breathe in the clean air, not hear the cumulative hum of the gazillion combustion engines, and the city's infamous traffic has momentarily become a living history. The silence reminds you of the silence after a sigh. The city is free of its residents, at last, at least. — % &There's no speck of humans in long lanes. Even the sentinel strays are too sleepy to bark, completely disinterested to chase. It seems a long day has gotten over, your Enfield's sputter is the city's snore. In the circuitous crosses that make you go ABCD and mazey mains that push you to recite the table of 1 on way to your home, you encounter a lot of shady and empty patches. The very roads used to somewhat terrorise you not less than ten years ago. You'd wonder what if someone—upon seeing you ride your red Thunderbird solo—chased or intercepted you and robbed? Such stories weren't unheard of from where you come from. — % &In 2015, you'd race hurriedly through these deserted and doomed alleys, your pulse on a perpetual high, abating only once you reached home and locked your door. These what-ifs don't bother you anymore. No, not because you are older, and hence, braver now. Despite your large frame and infinitely larger male privilege that has let you be out alone on the road at this hour, you're still quite chicken-hearted. Your chutzpah has more to do with one simple thing that has changed on the roads at night over the past decade. Given how deplorable Bangalore's infrastructure is, it is certainly not the quality of roads or street lights and CCTVs. The change has entirely to do with humans and trust.— % &Earlier at this hour, there wouldn't be anyone trustworthy on the road. The police patrol car were far too few, and far too infrequent back then, as they are now. Every purposeless person on the road would feel like an open threat. But now, there's someone else, someone new, someone far more ubiquitous who evokes trust, familiarity and a sense of safety on the road. It's the Swiggy-Zomato delivery person, the branded stranger crossing you every few hundred meters incessantly, flitting past like a bumblebee on noiseless whirring Yulus. They're someone you don't know, yet you do.— % &You exactly know why they don't have time to loot you, to snatch your phone, to stab you and run. They have food and groceries to deliver within ten minutes, five stars to earn for that mighty tiny bonus on a timely delivery, they can neither spill nor stop otherwise their health insurance might go amiss. The job at hand is urgent enough for them to not stop to trouble you on the road, yet not urgent enough to not stop to help you if they see some other miscreant troubling you on the road. They're a travelling witness, a wordless companion that turns the solo rider that you are into a crowd of two, a noble human on your side by default—they served you food not too long ago! — % &No, you're not interested in romanticising their hardship. You know anyone can be evil, anyone can turn into a criminal, but statistically, only a tiny fraction of delivery guys would turn rogue, that too on the road. You believe this in earnestness, and not because you're idealising their struggle. You just trust their reality. You know they're doing a job, which means their KYC is complete, their background is verified and they will not dare do something to come in the eye of the law. To the one in a job, the fear of losing their job goes far deeper than every other fear they might have. An employee is the least free person on the planet because they're addicted to the drug called monthly salary, around and with which their life is built. Salary is life to such existence, else one won't be in a job. And the lesser the salary, the more the fear of consequences.— % &To commit a crime, one doesn't need poverty or hardship as much as one needs the lack of fear of consequences and free time. Which are two things that an employed individual doesn't have. This reality, and this reality alone, gives you peace, and while you could have thanked the delivery folks for their trusted omnipresence that is helping make the city safer, you very clearly know what you're truly thanking. Capitalism.— % &
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