Of Mad traffic and other Races

In life, as always, some choices are tough. And a trifle tricky at times.

Let’s take driving through the Bellandur junction, for example. Every time I drive down that stretch (that’s twice a day, 5 days a week) I get ripped apart, trying to decide whether to take the Service road opposite Akme Harmony or continue on the generous expanse of the Outer ring road.

Don’t get me wrong, this is by no means less serious than any other decision I have taken in my life, like getting married or being a strict Non-Vegetarian!! It has the potential of making or breaking your day, and chances are it does the latter, more often than not.

So what’s the grave dilemma here, you may think! None, is the answer.

For the intelligent species, none at all! For whichever road you take, there’s bound to be bikers that think they have right of way and Truckers who feel the Fast lane was an exclusive property of their kinds. There would be school buses stopping at every little pretext and Office buses blowing traffic signals to the wind. There would be cyclists (that might put Lance Armstrong to shame) making a favourite pastime of denting and scratching your car. And above all, there would be prehistoric Tractors (apparently these were commissioned to assist the catering logistics around sometime in the later Triassic) plying anything, from a tank of water to Coffins, all through the middle of the road. For once, I have left the Cab drivers to rest in peace!!

Yet, on every occasion these 10 times a week, my optimistic inner self drives me towards a discord about deciding my course. I remain amazed at this obstinate stupidity of mine, the one I discovered ever since I came in to stay in Bangalore.

Well, there is nothing wrong about Bangalore per se. It’s a nice city, bursting at its seams. If you have learnt the fine art accepting whatever comes your way, you are a happy man here. They say happiness is about managing your own expectations. It can’t get truer than it is in Bangalore. Don’t expect, is the mantra.

See this was a fine city with a nice weather and empty streets, much reminiscent of the Raj days. It was a retired mans paradise, the ideal location for a Vedic “Vanaprastha”. But then something happened, in the true Las Vegas style. In came the Software brigade, like The Huns from Central Asia, and made Bangalore their home. They plundered the rich silence of this city, made a mockery of its weak infrastructure and set about a pace of degeneration in the political apparatus of the state that, in my ill informed opinion, is unparalleled in the history of mankind.

Once settled to the soil, these Huns started multiplying by actively “recruiting” from around the country. Such was the demand for the younger Huns that Hun Grooming Schools (they also called them Engineering Colleges, Institute Of Technology, and such silly names) sprang up across the country. Gone were the rigours of being a true Hun, the arduous travel through hostile tribal territories or walking up to the chilly winters of Europe. All you needed was a basic skill in mundane activities like summing up digits and a daddy with deep pockets.

If Daddy got you into the Hun school of Excellence, there was likelihood that he got you a Two-wheeler too. Some silly 100-150 CC, doing 60kmph, and not mph, in the time I would take to relieve myself.

After all, what good is an immobile Hun to society? Don’t we all know that the basic responsibility of a Hun is to try ride through city traffic like a lunatic, under an almost established assumption that he was riding Hayabusa (and not its poor step brother, a stripped down 150CC, made in Gurgaon, Hero Honda). We also know that a Hun ought to be scratching and denting other people’s cars and should display their best riding skills (Rossi, my boy, Quo Vadis?) in front of utterly disinterested womenfolk. Now daddy might not have been a Hun himself but he did know the tricks of the trade. And that’s why you got what you got to create a mess of yourself in the streets.

Yes, you deserve to be pardoned if you were to think this was a paper on the life and times of early Huns. That was, however, not my intention. And howsoever hard am tempted to detract myself; I will commit my energies to my purpose - to comment on my pedestrian dilemma at Bellandur.

So, traffic civility is a stuff of legends here in Bangalore, a figment of a poet’s imagination. If you were bold and intelligent enough, by this time you would know why it is so. And who the hell cares anyway? The idea is to get past, not to reach. Here you drive to create public nuisance, not to reach a destination.

There is another class of Huns (to which I belong) here in Bangalore that deserve a special mention when we talk of contributing to the petrifying traffic situation -the ones that use mobile phones while on the wheels. Yes you got it - these are the ones that block Free Left’s at free will. Now there is nothing wrong about having a mobile phone, it is another thing to be obsessed with them.

Here’s where I get a little racial, if you may allow me to. As a race, we Indians (if you ever believed in One India, shining or rising, whatever) are fascinated by small things in life - like gizmos. Our visions and perspectives are limited to such trivia as mobile phones and MP3 players. We develop these with the skill of a practised artisan, investing our collective technological might. And then we use them with the pride of a schoolboy. Ironically, while we engage ourselves in doing these things, the Germans or the French (or any other sensible group of Homo sapiens) would invest their skills in developing a new technology that can cut emissions or bomb the daylights out of our cities in the event of a political disagreement, while we keep clutching our MP3 players ever closer to our hearts.

And the best part is that they know it - the whole world is aware of our inane fascination for gizmos. Remember Sophie & Langdon taking a Bus to Chelsea library in the Movie version of Da Vinci Code? There was a guy playing with his mobile in the bus who Sophie later reached to conduct some search on the web. Didn’t that guy look decidedly South Asian? If the author were to put a name to him, I am sure he would call him a Mahesh or a Suresh. Or a Venkatsubramanian turned “Venky” in his British Avatar.

Sophie would definitely not be surprised to meet the Hun “Venky” in Bangalore streets. I have reason to believe Dan Brown will soon be in Bangalore trying to frame the sequel of his novel. And this time the search is not for the Grail or the descendants of Maria Magdalene.

This one is about the hidden treasures of Huns in Bangalore.

Afterthought: need some salt?