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where have all the rickshaws gone?


     It has been more than two years I've been living in Delhi and I think I still don't know many a things about it. There are certain questions bouncing in my little head just as a bouncing pinball in it's closed fancy closet. There are few rational answers to them, but few I just like keeping unanswered.
        An example to the first kind was "why do all people live in flats". I mean of course we all know the most probable answers to this kindergarten question. The property price hike and all. But an example to the latter kind though is little more fascinating. "where are all the rickshaw pullers?"
         Here in Delhi, I've lived in three very different colonies till date. A mediocre Malka ganj, a bad chandraval, and an above average saket. But in neither of the colonies I could spot a school rickshaw. A rickshaw in which a wooden bench just widened the space for kids to sit, in which kids with fancy school clothes went on blabbering in thin voices, a bhaiyya Ji who was the ultimate Charioteer on whose head the kids would cook their cookers, the bench which adjusted a hundred bags and still had space for a hundred more, the rickshaws which would race and kids would cheer, a rickshaw puller who would make kids cross the road with utter care, one who would sometimes even scold them. None of it. The only substitutes I could see were yellow striped maruti vans with a roof bumper. Where have all the rickshaws gone?

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