Sell your car buy a horse
Sandip C. Jain
During the period when the campaigning for the Kalimpong Municipal elections was at its peak, a seemingly bright candidate put up several posters in several areas of the town urging the vehicle owners of Kalimpong to sell their cars and alternate it with a more suitable form of transport more adaptable to the pot hole filled roads of the town- the alternate suggested was a Horse!!! The posters and the pun that it carried were intended to highlight the extremely poor condition of the roads in Kalimpong.
Though quite a few of the roads have had repairs since the posters sprung up, the vehicle owners could still give the suggestion in the posters a second thought though this time it is less due to the quality of the roads and more due to the quality of the Fuel that the Fuel Pumps of the town are choking our car engines with.
Though of course I am no technical expert on evaluating the quality of Oil being provided to us but then any person who has driven a car for a reasonable period of time, can even by simply hearing the sound that the car engine makes, can make a fair enough assessment of the quality of Oil that the tank holds. I am sorry to say but the awful chattering that the car engines makes when running on fuel filled in the Fuel Pumps of Kalimpong, is a sure shot sign of there being something seriously wrong in the fuel supplied.
With so many hundreds of cars clogging the roads of Kalimpong, it’s a wonder why nobody, including the otherwise hyper sensitive drivers Unions, makes any effort to check what is wrong. Everyone seems to agree that there is something fishy going on but no one is motivated enough to take any further steps.
I am told that during the tenure of the previous S.D.O. of Kalimpong, a complaint had been made and if rumors are to be believed, an eyewash of an enquiry was made before the matter being swept under the carpet. Why??? Well you can take you guess!!!
So I guess it brings us back to the suggestion on the posters “Sell your car buy a horse”.