Just jammin’

Just jammin’

C.K. MEENA

Debate It takes little to stir up a jam these days: a swearing-in ceremony, a farmers’ protest march, or even a solitary vehicle that breaks down in a strategic spot

Photo: K. Gopinathan

Grid lock When will the flying car get off the drawing board?

It’s raining jam, haven’t you noticed? In the past fortnight, traffic jams have smothered the city streets and left road-users gasping and clinging on to their cellphones and sanity by their fingernails. Someone I know took two hours to g et from Dickenson Road to Infantry Road. A single kilometre. Historic is the word that comes to mind.

It takes little to stir up a jam these days: a swearing-in ceremony, a farmers’ protest march, or even a solitary vehicle that breaks down in a strategic spot. Ah for the good old days when the only cause of a traffic block was a visiting head of state bound for the Raj Bhavan! Some recent jams were a premium brand, costly in terms of time squandered. The manufacturers: competing politicians (“My rally is bigger than yours”) followed by a long weekend when too many Bangaloreans decided to rush out of town all at the same time. Forget “premium”, we’ve been treated to “regular” for quite a while. Weekend shoppers, joined by workers on the Metro who have sliced the width of M.G. Road by half, have plunged into the jam-making business in right earnest.

The weekend culture has gradually come to stay in Bangalore. I remember, a couple of years ago, a BMTC driver growling “Saturday special” to the conductor as he inched forward on the stretch of Airport Road that led to Richmond Road. “I thought the rush was only in the M.G. Road-Brigade Road area,” he complained. “Illi koode band-bittide, appa.” I began to encounter autodrivers who refused to go towards the central shopping zone on Saturday afternoons. One driver told me, “Everyone is shopping. I don’t know what they are shopping so much for.” A parking attendant on Church Street, who wedged a young man’s bike into a non-existent space, grumbled, “Friday and Saturday, always like this.” It’s not unusual to hear of traffic jams at midnight in these parts.

This is when you begin to wish that the inventors of the flying car would step on it. Engineers in the west are already working on the prototype – I kid you not – of a car that can leapfrog over stationary vehicles when required. Until it moves from drawing board to factory we’ll have to settle for the next best thing: helicopters. Once the preserve of politicians and other high-fliers, the chopper, we hear, may be used to ferry passengers to the new Devanahalli airport if our roads remain what they are.

Choose public transport over private – we’ve all heard the mantra. Unfortunately, cars and their owners stick together more closely than Siamese twins. The BMTC, in a burst of wild optimism, is trying to prise them apart by starting a Mall Special service – a fleet of blue buses with the names of the major malls painted on the sides in English and Kannada. Somehow one fails to visualise mall-hoppers balancing shopping bags on arms and shoulders and staggering into buses. It’s more likely that they would take the lift to the car park in the basement. Who, then, is the Mall Special meant for? Window shoppers, perhaps.

But the jam that comprises the most mysterious ingredients, according to me, is the one caused by rain. Someone please explain to me the logical connection between traffic jams and inclement weather. The roads don’t shrink when exposed to water like cheap fabric in the wash. Their width is the same before and after. People don’t rush out into the streets in their vehicles the moment the first drops fall to the ground, no, they don’t. Therefore, the amount of traffic remains the same as well. You might tell me that everyone slows down so as not to skid or cause accidents. Well then, we should still be moving, however slowly, and not remaining static, bumper-to-bumper. Flooded roads used to be cited as a reason, but even after improved drainage, traffic still freezes. Oh, vehicles get detained at the traffic lights, I see. Fewer drivers pass through the green when it appears and they encounter red three times or more before they cross the signal. Hmm. I don’t know whether that’s a convincing enough explanation.

It is nearly 10 p.m. and raining. Our bus waits wearily near Ulsoor Lake. Tired eyes, yawning faces. The driver switches on an FM channel which abruptly bangs out a 50-year-old song. The rock’n’roll beat of “Mera Naam Chin-Chin Chu” at top volume wakes up the passengers like an electric shock applied to their backsides. Traffic is chockablock but the gay abandon of the merry singer is enough to ease tension all around. A man behind me begins to sing under his breath and drum his fingers on the back of my seat. Maybe he can picture Helen dancing.

“Hello mister, how do you do?” The bus creeps forward. A more appropriate number comes to my mind, one by Bob Marley. “We’re jammin’, jammin’. I hope you like jammin’ too.” Er, not exactly.