In West Bengal, they call it the “Ambulance Express”. Every afternoon, it chugs out of the station at Howrah, towards Chennai, a bulk of its passengers being Bengal’s diseased and ailing, sick and long-suffering. The desultory conversation of the passengers (of what is formally known as the Coromandel Express) usually revolves around the competing medical merits of a Vellore, a Chennai or even Bangalore, with an occasional sigh for the crumbling health infrastructure of the home state.

But even the doomed residents of a moribund province may live in hope; a yellowed, moth-eaten structure, living its autumn, may yet offer a fresh spurt of life when the worst is over. Such hyperbole, you wonder, and all because the two main opposition parties in the state — the Trinamool Congress and the Congress — have decided to ally before the elections, to better equip themselves to take on the might of a government in power for 32 years, which openly flaunts a “machinery” to win popular votes? You wonder, because you have never been part of that queue of desperate hopefuls trying to flee your stagnating home state, in search of better education, promising livelihood options or even improved medication.

Not everybody tries to escape though; depopulation is definitely not one of West Bengal’s banes. If you are a have-not in this Marxist utopia, then welcome to a lifetime of navigating through appallingly ill-maintained government hospitals, where a tout will determine how many fellow patients you will share a bed (or corridor space) with, or where newborns must come equipped with the skills to save themselves from hordes of mice or mauling dogs. Or put your children through government schools, where the idiosyncrasies of party ideologues would decide whether they get to learn English early in life or not, where party faithfuls are recruited as teachers and where school schedules can become hostage to party jamborees.

... contd.