Sunday, August 27, 2006

Bangalored - Further travel travails in the garden city

If the maze of one way streets was not enough, there is now a Bangalore version of Russian Roulette played on the roads.
Real incident:
My boss drives from Koramangala to office each day by a particular road.
Goes off to the US for 2 weeks.
Back home , hangs his usual right into the main road and is chugging along when he sees a approaching car in his lane. He ignores it and goes on,only to discover a steady stream of cars in his lane. Unnerved , he stops and shakes his fist at the first car.The driver slows down, unrolls the window and yells " Its a f***ing ONE WAY you moron ".
Needless to say, the signboards turned up only a week after this incident . Oh yes,some of the signboards in Koramangala are only in Kannada ;-)
Come evening , a friend had organized a dawa-daru session with a few other hardy souls we knew , plan being that I meet him at his office on Bannerghatta Road before heading for the watering hole.
6:45 - I step out of my office and hail an auto - auto guy refuses after hearing the destination. More autos -Take 2, take 3 . Fourth attempt the auto fellow just gazes incomprehensibly at me , mutters something and ignores me thereafter.
6:57 - Frantic call to friend elicits this response "Just walk down- it is less than a KM"
I start off - and reach his office 25 min later short of breath and full of smoke and dust. Salient learning's from the exercise :
A ) Bannerghata road is deadlocked from 6-7:30 PM, sane souls(autowallahs esp) do not venture anywhere near it.
B ) The pavement is used exclusively by two-wheelers.
Pedestrians were not to be seen -I guess this life form has become extinct in Bangalore --something to do with Darwin's law and lung cancer I suspect.
On an unrelated note- yesterdays headline was NGO activists protesting the Bangalore Municipal Corporation decision to fell over 700 trees that the corp says are a "Threat to life and property".
And yes if you are wondering what happened to the house - I managed to find one this time- I did resort to hiding my laptop and only volunteering info about relocating from Hyderabad, with nary a mention of the Big O that I work for. Quoted rents fell correspondingly by about 25 % ;-)
The move is symbolically planned for Mayday - Bangalore junta are requested to stand by to bail me out if needed ;-)

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