MOBILE IN BANDA

Day Three: Aur bhi share rides hai zamaane mein Ola-Uber ke siwa

While moving around town, the battery charged e-rickshaws are a convenient hop on and off way to navigate gullies, in a way that buses simply aren’t here. Watching Meera, the Khabar Lahariya reporter I've teamed up with in Banda, I realise, it is also an open negotiation on rates, distance and the driver’s mood. Me, being there, is possibly an opportunity to sometimes charge higher. But a seasoned local, who actually hails not from Banda proper, she rejects many who charge a rupee more than the Rs 10 or 15 rupees. My Bangalore based mind does a Faiz update in the head – Aur bhi share rides hai zamaane mein Ola-Uber ke siwa.

Meera uses this mobile time too, to check WhatsApp messages from the rest of the reporting team. I let her be and wonder - walking through lanes where it is faster to walk than take the main roads, seeing an ole man cycle around, a kala-peela auto for only singularly outbound traffic and the buses near the Roadways stand, reminds me of what a complex pool of transportation is required to service a town, with both a strong rural closeness and keeping things close, within town. To move freely, the battery charged rickshaws feel rickety on comfort, but make ample sense to deliver folk in a smaller radius. A metro’s last mile connectivity option, would then become this town’s primary mode of transport, in a way that man-driven rickshaws and Vikrams in Lucknow used to be. Khabar Lahariya reporters navigate this daily, often without a blip. And given that they report from villages nearby, often on a daily basis, one’s respect for their time spent on the road navigating craters and mobile phone signals, only goes up. Although, roads quite clearly do not deserve respect here, but the chai stops at every corner provide the relief that #manythingsarkar rarely does.

For some inexplicable reason, I find myself thinking of the walking stick from Day One, as I see Meera, sip tea, while checking her mobile for journo info. She too, after all is a full on Mobile Jone. 

Tisha Srivastav, a part time editorial consultant with Khabar Lahariya sends in snapshots of her experiences in Bundelkhand reporting, with Bundelkhandi reporters. Catch her live-tweeting some of the action here!