Hooking to the lighter side of jams

Hooking to the lighter side of jams
Deccan Herald

You have this important appointment at 9.30 in the morning that can make or break your career. You don’t want to be late. Dressed impeccably in your neatly pressed shirt and trousers that you had saved up for just this kind of an occasion, you step into you four-wheeler and merge into the traffic, assuming to reach there well ahead of time. And why shouldn’t you if you started an hour before the scheduled appointment when the drive hardly takes 15 to 20 minutes in normal traffic.

Now, before we go any further, we need to ascertain the subtle differences that exist in meaning and perception in the context of location. The term ‘normal traffic’ in Bangalore, takes on a slightly different meaning compared to other cities. What is perceived to be ‘normal’ in this garden city, bumper-to-bumper traffic, is, not surprisingly quite ‘abnormal’ in others. So your 15 to 20 minutes of travel time in ‘normal traffic’ will have to be judged from that angle, whether you are reflecting the garden city’s perspective or others.

Unfortunately, human mentality being what it is, you invariably assign the normally perceived meaning and time yourself accordingly. So you join the flowing traffic or rather the ‘crawling’, with a very positive mind. Ten minutes into this snail paced movement, you start wondering as to why you still are where you started.

The traffic then picks up momentum slightly and you assure yourself that ‘it is just the signal holding it up’ and that you should be there at your destination soon.

That ‘soon’ however stretches to three quarters of an hour as you just about make it on time for the appointment, after taking the circuitous one-ways and effectively putting up a fight over parking that is unfortunately a couple of blocks away from your scheduled meeting place.

You reach there sweating, flustered and greet your significant person with one hand wiping the sweat off your brow even as you struggle to catch your breath. This was certainly not the way you had planned it.

Having chosen to live in this erstwhile ‘garden’ city, knowing that the state of our roads are guaranteed to alter not in the positive direction and are more likely to uniformly start pointing in only one direction, given our penchant for resorting to one-ways as a cure for all ills, perhaps it is time to alter our perspective as well as expectations. At least that is something that can be altered to yield positive results.

For starters, we could draw comfort that at least some of our roads still bear a semblance of structure. Not all our roads resemble the state that Bannerghatta road or the Varathur road were in, not too long back, though they hold a lot of promise to soon be.

One-ways sure make you go around in circles and give you the opportunity to pollute more as well as get polluted but then hasn’t the traffic police gone on record attributing a decline in accidents to this single way corridor?

Now, how many cities greet you unfailingly with unfinished structures blending with rusting iron and full-grown weeds with the promise of a soon-to-be completed ‘fly-over’? And how many cities have traffic choking on top of a fly-over?

How many cities can boast of two-wheelers and auto rickshaws perennially cutting into your lane, and dangerously so when on the ring roads, where Bangaloreans for a change do get to test the speed limits?

These are rare sights indeed. And how many places offer you the opportunity to rein in your temper constantly, by exposing the futility of giving into it in the thick of unruly traffic?

Where else would you get this opportunity to enact your balancing act on your two-wheeler as you inch your way through the narrow gaps before someone else does? These are incredible exercises for the mind and body, delivered free.

So perhaps, instead of complaining, Bangaloreans should be thankful for these rare sights, experiences and opportunities. Like rising in the wee hours of the morning to make it on time to your 8 O’Clock appointment.

Now isn’t that a habit our grand parents tried hard to inculcate but failed? Shouldn’t we be grateful to our city planners for lending the inspiration to develop this virtue?