When parking becomes nuisance

And today driving a car is not luxury at all. First, you don’t have money, but you need something to drive you around and the only option left is to avail loan from a financial institution. If you are lucky, you get the money after a great hassle. This is good because that’s how banks earn revenues for the government and you are part of that revenue-making process.

Second, you now have the borrowed money, you book a vehicle and once it is ready, you bear the burden of paying some extra borrowed money as tax. That’s good too because it contributes to the nation. Hopefully, a small fraction of this revenue reaches every mouth in the country. Third, you have to take this weird and nonsensical putting-in-the-box test to have the documents to drive, which is also good because if everyone is allowed to drive without driving license, we will have even a ten-year old boy from powerful family on the wheels.

And lastly, you pay the burden of paying to park your cars. I understand the companies that take the pain of collecting parking fees pay some form of tax to the government, but I fail to understand how their collection would take care of the immediate need of paving better road and providing better parking lots. We don’t see that happen if it is not for Dantak.

You would see young boys and girls wearing some odd looking jerseys chasing cars after cars. And even if you park for a minute you would be still paying fees. Well, paying parking fees to park your cars in towns makes sense, because there are limited parking spaces here.

The place where I stay is far from the main town. And here there are no traces of parking lots being marked. Mostly it is the residents and their relatives visiting who park here. But some people are already deployed there to collect parking fees. The amount levied is often based on the duration the cars lie idle there, but often they charge on baseless justifications. I understand why my uncle visits my apartment less and less now.

If you go to Siliguri, you will find what it means to collect parking fees. These people take care of your cars in your absence and help you to safely exit the parking lot. Do we have them in our parking fee collectors?

But for now, I make the pictures do the talking.

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