Give a man a fish he eats for a day and teach a man to fish he eats for a lifetime. After talking to Mr. Pankaj Tyagi, 33, Government school teacher, a patriotic man and one of few ‘aware’ gentlemen of the Indian citizenry, we are now convinced of the saying now more than ever. Here we resorted to the use of the word aware instead of educated, as about 74 % of us are educated but few are truly aware (of whats going on around them) and fewer still who care. For starters he knew what Hyperloop was and how it worked. Not the Engineering details but the basic science of it. We never had encountered a user in all of our non-graduation level user research who was not only aware of Hyperloop, but was actively looking forward to it. We didn’t know how to start our interview so we started off with a simple “Will it work in India? Does India really need it?” His answer was a stupendous 'Absolutely yes’; not only was it a good concept but it would also expedite transport, make it faster. He not only found our current infrastructure 'too rickety’ but mainly rusty and too reminiscent of the imperial rule we had been under for so long. For a second progress went out the window. What hit me as an Indian was it was bloody unacceptable in this 21st century for any self respecting democracy leave alone a developing country (with the largest development rate) to allow that archaic xenophilia of ours still haunt us through our infrastructure. His pupils dilated as he referred to our transportation infrastructure as a harassment of the Indian citizens. On being asked if harassment was bit of an overstatement he went on to explain his own situation as he lives in Meerut and works in Delhi, it being a 3 hour train ride, he had to buy a place in an already overcrowded city like Delhi (to work), as 6 hour travel per day takes too much time of his life travelling. He mentioned his initial plan to go home (Meerut) to visit his family on weekends, till then it seemed sensible; but what was bizarre was nowadays he’s so tired from work that he barely goes to Meerut even on weekends. Natually He cant (shouldnt have to) afford six hours travel on weekends (the days to officially chill out). But before we got a chance to, he also dissected his own case study for us. We have in our very own system design class, a team who has taken ‘Migration’ as a topic. I had always wondered during their presentations “Is Migration good or bad?” “What is the problem here?” “Who are they solving for?” (For the Immigrants? the Administration or the Locals?) “What are they trying to solve here?”. Reading as much of history as I have, I always thought that migration was just a natural phenomena, like osmosis. If there are people they are bound to move about trying to explore every corner of the earth. That has been our genetic programming since Homo Habilis, Errectus, Australopithecus you name it. The fact that our genus came to dominate the earth was our natural tendency to flow like water on a table. It taught us sailing, swimming, flying and now space travel as well. That’s whats made us populate the whole wide world instead of just Lake Rudolf in Ethiopia. We roamed about and often found that people (us) have already been living there! (Oops this place has already been discovered!) Now that got awkward real fast. Enter History. So much blood has been shed over this. Entire races, creeds, even species have been eliminated over this. & it still continues to this day. Remember Israel-Palestine? Remember Hitler? Remember Trump? Shiv-Sena? But Tyagiji here actually gave me a bigger picture of things. Why do people migrate? Aspiration. We seek. We seek what we don’t have. Sometimes what, we don’t even know. Mexicans seek a better life for their future generations and so does the people in Bihar. Migration in a region is bad. He said it outright. Because it’s a litmus test that things ain’t right there. From an administrative point of view, if there’s migration happening in your region, then obviously people aren’t happy there. A country’s failure can be measured in how many people are migrating from it, instead of to it. Same can be said about a state, a district, a village. So If administration as a whole, does everything they can to stop migration in their unit of administration, we as country can start to de-urbanize, hinterlands can start growing and we’ll have a homogeneous network of satellite cities rather than overcrowded mega-cities bursting with people and systems breaking down (be it legal, transport, infrastructure, etc). And as a designer and amateur ethnographer in this project I really can shed some light on the fact is that transportation system plays a major role in this. In Tyagiji’s case it would be his reason to migrate to Delhi. Maybe I always knew it in my gut, but he gave me a glimpse of an entire generation of people who are just wasting away years (in hours everyday) of their life stuck in just traffic or in slower modes of transport. The educated, productive and innovative youth have through their youtube channels, kickstarter ideas and TedEx talks proved how productive free time nay me time is.
