7th March 2011
The day began - just as its sister began 24 hours earlier - and decided to present me with traffic jams. This wasn't quite new to me: Several such presents are stacked in my memory. And since the only way to get to office is by accepting this gift and opening it up so that it disperses around, I sighed and tore open the wrapping.
The jam spread all around Kurla depot at 9:05 am in the morning and caught the tyres of my bus as well. So, the bus driver did not even bother to change gears. We were demonstrated the use of the first gear right up to Saki Naka. At that Naka, no square metre of the road allowed the driver to continue and so, the demonstration came to a rather grating grinding end.
We sat and sighed and made all sorts of noises but the bus refused to even consider what we were going through. Only after a full ten minutes, during which it puffed like a fire dragon, did it decide to let go of its flair for smoky opera and trundled down to Marol Pipeline.
The journey back home didn't have less of this squash either. As it is, for the first time, in the history of my working at Andheri East, did I let go of my office bus to meet a friend working nearby. And then, when we do sit down to coffee, he tells me: "Oh! You know what? I just have 20 minutes! So let's make this a quick one!"
Now I have heard people mouth a lot many meaningless frothy lines. For example:
The day began - just as its sister began 24 hours earlier - and decided to present me with traffic jams. This wasn't quite new to me: Several such presents are stacked in my memory. And since the only way to get to office is by accepting this gift and opening it up so that it disperses around, I sighed and tore open the wrapping.
The jam spread all around Kurla depot at 9:05 am in the morning and caught the tyres of my bus as well. So, the bus driver did not even bother to change gears. We were demonstrated the use of the first gear right up to Saki Naka. At that Naka, no square metre of the road allowed the driver to continue and so, the demonstration came to a rather grating grinding end.
We sat and sighed and made all sorts of noises but the bus refused to even consider what we were going through. Only after a full ten minutes, during which it puffed like a fire dragon, did it decide to let go of its flair for smoky opera and trundled down to Marol Pipeline.
The journey back home didn't have less of this squash either. As it is, for the first time, in the history of my working at Andheri East, did I let go of my office bus to meet a friend working nearby. And then, when we do sit down to coffee, he tells me: "Oh! You know what? I just have 20 minutes! So let's make this a quick one!"
Now I have heard people mouth a lot many meaningless frothy lines. For example:
- "I have so much work to do!" this when no one around even pretends to believe that!
- "I think I am gonna die now." - this when they know fully well they won't.
- "I am dead." - this when even the undertaker will refuse to bury them.
- "I don't care!" - this when even a smirk is enough to rattle them.
- "I have been slogging!" - this when even the line itself knows this isn't quite true!
So it came as no surprise when this fellow said that we were to make this meet a quick one!
And a quick one it was. We sat, stared at the coffee, stared at the ceiling, mouthed exactly what the other wanted to hear, and by 7:00 pm, I was out on the road. And the state of the traffic was as if the exodus from The Ten Commandments was being updated for the 31st century!
I wonder how many of you have seen The Ten Commandments. It's quite an epic yet simple saga about how Moses led the Israelites away from slavery and directed them into a land flowing with milk and honey. Of course, all that happened sometime in BC and camels and horses were all that could be seen in the caravan that made its way from Egypt to Israel. Even so, I daresay those beasts caused any sort of bottlenecks anywhere. Why! They all sauntered away quite coolly from one shore into the parted Red Sea, stepped onto dry land on the opposite shore, and through it all Moses did not even require the Mumbai traffic police to maintain law and order! Nor had any of those Israelites to learn traffic rules and appear for driving exams!
But then - remember - all that happened way back in time. Were the trip to be made now, Hollywood would only have to station a helicopter atop the Kurla-Andheri road and their exodus footage would be like none other! For there there're the beasts - the roaring trucks, the filthy vans, the mammoth buses; there're the people - sighing, losing faith in the system, praying when the world will come to an end; and there're are - of course - people like me who question the need to take that God-damned route at all when all one has to do is shift to another city instead!
Apparently, it's easier questioned than done. City shifts involve a whole lot of headaches: You spend to shift, you spend to set up home, you spend on transport, you spend on illegal gas cylinders, and you spend on tickets - air tickets - when you get homesick! Obviously, I am not the one to spend so much, and so, with that thought as my comfort pill, I got into a taxi and sighed and lost faith in the system.
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