For Akhil, a 21-year-old from Kunnamangalam in Kozhikode, it proved to be a nightmare trip.
Having reached the city around 6 a.m. on a day when RSS called for a State-wide hartal, the youngster got stranded at the railway station for more than four hours.
Neither a taxi nor an autorickshaw on hire, the 12 noon reporting time for the exam at Coast Guard headquarters at Kalvathy near Fort Kochi was looking increasingly closer.
He had almost resigned to the fate of the untimely hartal squandering his six month-long painstaking preparations for the exam when a group of youngsters turned up as saviours. Thudding on some heavy bullet bikes, they picked him up and dropped him at the exam centre.
As Kerala observed one more dawn-to-dusk hartal on Tuesday, a group of youngsters refused to take it as an excuse for switching into a laid-back mode. Instead, they decided to use the occasion for sending a strong message to the political parties who call for hartals at the drop of a hat — not to mess up with their lives.
Members of ‘Bullethood’, a Kochi-based biker club, volunteered to transport hundreds of passengers from the railway station here to their destinations on their two-wheelers. They even dropped passengers to regions as far as Aluva town and Fort Kochi.
“We decided do some good work on the hartal day, as we have been doing for the past one year. We have 80 members but many could not take part since the hartal announcement was made late on Monday and about 10 members came forward to help,’’ Roban Gilbert, club president, said.
Similarly, the Say No To Hartal Campaigners operated dawn-to-dusk services in their own private vehicles at free of cost to help victims of the ‘unconstitutional form of protest’. “We operated a fleet of 22 vehicles from different locations of the city, all displaying ‘Say no to hartal’ stickers on them. Most of the passengers transported during the day were patients who had reached the city seeking speciality treatment from far away places,” said Raju P Nair, general convenor of the organisation.
Operating the services on a hartal day, however, was not an incident-free affair as they faced attacks at five locations. “If the political parties want to take out their angst on us, let them do so, but we will go ahead with our mission’’, he said.
