National Traffic Awareness Memorial (12°55'2.56"N, 77°37'22.23"E)

 

Documenting Bengaluru was much needed for me; I have visited a few times over the years, albeit for a day or two each time. I am never able to explore town and go to areas that have memories or personal meaning attached to them; that being said, I always pay a visit to NTAM at Silk Board junction, or as some would know it, the National Traffic Awareness Memorial. Most tourists come here to laugh at a city brought to its knees during the events of The Great Jam of 2034 or engage in the ‘Can You Walk Faster Than The Average Traffic Speed?’ challenge, which can be successfully attempted by any creature capable of walking. But I come here for a different reason. I come here for the silence. It is eerie, inspiring and disconcertingly loud, like the grave of a great general who led their army to victory but caused many a life to be lost along the way. If you don’t know what this is about, let me enlighten you.

The Great Jam of 2034 was and will probably remain the third biggest manmade disaster Bengaluru has experienced in its history; the most comprehensive collapse of transit infrastructure and a society forced to use it in a city having a rich, storied history of infrastructure collapses. It all started one fateful evening as people were getting home from work in the south-west, like the day before it and the twenty-five years before that. For the first few hours, everything was normal. It started raining heavily, the drains overflowed faster than I can write this sentence by hand, and a bunch of people tried to run a red light following an ambulance that had been given way – gridlock. This was nothing new to the tens of thousands of commuters in the area, who eventually came to a stop and settled in for the three-hour delay. And that was when things got really bad.

The Metro tracks experienced a power outage, so people previously in it spilled out onto the streets in droves only to see an unending ocean of stationary vehicles surrounding them; they ended up walking home. Once it stopped raining, the clogged drains refused to clear and the water, earlier comprised of river rapids snaking their way in between cars and buses, turned into a still, unmoving lake. An onlooker described it as ‘traffic cereal in a bowl of waterlogging milk’. Even the overpass (or ‘flyover’ as it’s called here) refused to get rid of its burden. Close to midnight with no end in sight, citizens at the outskirts of the jam turned around to go back home and were met with barricades squarely blocking their way; traffic police had put them up to discourage people from driving towards the jam but had gone home without moving them out of the way again. So, there they were. Approximately a hundred thousand human beings stuck on a hundred roads. So, they were left with no choice.

They went home. Sodden and tired. They left their vehicles behind.

The next day, in a show of great power and responsibility, government officials came to the intersection, announced that they would requisition a huge amount of funds to demolish the entire intersection and build a whole new interchange that would be ready in twelve years, and left. They asked a bunch of traffic cops to make sure the jam was unclogged. When said cops reached Silk Board, they could not believe what they saw.

There was no one there.

All the people stuck in the jam, through a coordinated and clearly communicated effort, had decided that, in protest, they would not come back to move their vehicles. And once the rest of the city learned about it, they came to the junction in droves and demanded change. The same government officials turned up in a screaming hurry, made more promises, and then threatened to bring cranes and lift each vehicle to the side. All the citizens at the junction laughed for ten minutes until they were crying uncontrollably, regained their composure, humbly requested those in power to implement Project Crane-Lift Thousands Of Vehicles You Cannot Even Reach In The First Place, and went home to eat lunch.

Obviously, they gave up halfway in. Crane operators went on strike due to low wages and lack of perks. Gas stations (or ‘petrol bunks’ as they’re called here) in the area closed in protest of the jam not being cleared. Bars and restaurants surrounding the jam made a killing as people were more than happy to walk into them on account of there being no moving vehicles. At week’s end, a kilometre from the centre of the junction in every direction, vehicles still stood immobile, resolute. Eventually, people sarcastically petitioned to the government to leave them as they were; a lesson in how citizens must be cognizant of traffic rules. But it went completely over their heads, the government agreed to turn it into a memorial, named it NTAM, and the junction remains exactly the same to this day. It even floods the same way when it rains, providing an interactive experience for first-time visitors. A new junction was built beneath it at great cost, and everyone involved made lots of money from that whole process. I hear people say as they silently walk around, “Nothing moves.”