Kolkata, West Bengal, November 2011. Byways and highways jutting through like concrete ribs and poisoned arteries above the damp and the wet beneath, and the rickshaw wallahs… the downtrodden princes of Kolkata with the rivers in their blood… they bob and weave like boats on silent currents, just so, between steel-fendered-promises-of-death. The car is God. Bow down before it. Slide in and lose your humanity behind the wheel….. a finely packaged parcel of rage and impatient modernity in the midst of a sea of rickshaws… windows wound tight and like the gas-masked restaurant patron, smiling and farting gleefully, willfully and energetically, safe in the knowledge that he can expel to his colon's delight without ever having to endure his own foul contributions to the atmosphere. Owning and driving a car is having the license to say "fuck you" to the world every time you slide behind the wheel and step to the metal and no-where is this more blatantly obvious than in those mismatched jousts on Colgata streets. Salvation comes at a slower pace and peace and tranquility awaits you in the middle of that rickshaw jam, poles and eras removed from the peripheral-honking, the steer-wheel-slapping selfishness of the bicycle's benzine-burning-bastard-offspring's-owners and their self-righteous road-rage. Rickshaw cays, filtering swirling, carbon-monoxide-blues, invite glances both furtive and not from within and cageless, glassless, steel-pressed-boxless proximity ensures a constant theatre of exchanges, bells and laughter pealing and ringing in the islands' collective wakes. The future is behind us. We just drove past cursing it.
