You can tell something about a city's soul by its public transport. I spent my teenage years in Delhi. Which means I spent them in sputtering fights with auto drivers; waited interminably for the DTC bus, and when on it, suffered and raged against sexual harassment from men of every kind -- grinning Faridabad Jats, slithering Karol Bagh lalas, snickering Kalkaji romeos, falsely-respectable-looking South Ex sideys. It bespoke a city unfriendly not just to women who dared to leave home even if only to get a B.A. but to all those who could not afford to drive a car. Its message: you don't count, we aren't making this city of speed-some roads and psychedelically floral traffic islands for your benefit, please.

Fittingly, when I moved here I was scared to take the train at first. It was a symbol of responsible adulthood -- it promised to deliver me to the destination I sought. But I'd have to make the choice to step into a diverse world and get along with strangers. For years, I never got over the luxury of not arguing with auto drivers, who took me wherever I asked, and never looked lewdly at my chest in the rear view mirror!

So what happened here? Why does it now take us 20 minutes to get a rick nowadays? Why do Bombay auto and cab drivers barely stop, contemptuously flicking their head in question -- and whether you say Bandra, Goregaon, Powai, Deonar, Santa Cruz, Carmichael Road, Nariman Point, rev off in disgust as if insulted by the very thought? How did the travelling masses of the city get so separated into those who suffer traffic behind tinted windows and those who brave public transport -- neither of us really happy, like lovers too proud to make up?



When one state government ignored an excellent train system and instead of improving it, initiated a 58-flyover project -- and successive governments gleefully took this turn forward, people catch on that they don't count.

Now, when the MMRDA wants to construct nine metro lines simultaneously, no doubt with endless delays, turning city commutes into a dangerous jungle adventure, how can we not feel brutalised and turn into animals?
When that metro comes, even if it looks good and works through the monsoon, and we forget the cynicism and carelessness at the heart of development, will we have the civility left in us to care?

People speak in awed tones about the Delhi metro -- commuters stand in queues! No molestation either! Maybe because for once something joined the old, neglected city, with the new mobile one and the people from East or North Delhi who normally don't count felt like this was something that respected their needs, so they keep it clean and cherish its rhythms. Will we be able to say something like this about Bombay again? Or will each transportation project just take us further from each other, into a suspicious, isolating, intolerant co-existence?

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer, teacher and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com