Chaos

You have a boulevard. Keep huge rolling wooden logs in the middle of that road. Put in some smaller varieties of those logs which can roll a bit faster. Now if water starts flowing from one end not hard enough to blow these logs away, you can imagine how it will fill the gaps and race ahead of everybody.
When the huge load of vehicles start flowing in the morning, I always have this scene in my mind and I have imagined it from quite some time now. To clear the analogy, the big logs are the busses and the trucks, smaller logs are the cars, jeeps, tempos and autos while the water symbolizes two wheelers.

Chaos! That’s the only way I can describe the traffic in this part of the world. By ‘this part’, I may be referring to my route to office everyday but this is pretty much the case anywhere in India. I have seen it in Pune & Mumbai and now here in Bangalore. Many a times, I give a thought to it. Why are so many people so eager to race against everybody? What bounty awaits us at our destination which makes us so very impatient? No Clue.

We always start from the traffic signal when it is still some 5-7 seconds remaining, always go past the signal when it is well past 5-7 seconds that the red has come back again. Overtaking from left or from right has no meaning what so ever. Lane discipline? I bet we have a survey in Bangalore and most of them would have heard the word for the first time, some people (of whom I claim to be a part of) would conveniently blame it on the others. My usual justification whenever I break a lane is, “What the hell, nobody is following it.” What difference can I make other than thinking of myself to be an eternal fool as others race past me?

Pedestrians are the most hated creatures for many a vehicle drivers. Such is the plight of the people that crossing a road is something for which we should have a separate clause in Insurance agreements. One of my friends in office says, “Bangalore mein hath dikhake road cross karma padata hain”. (You have to wave your hands and beg the traffic for you to cross the road). True. Equally chaotic are the pedestrians. Overhead bridges don’t exist on most occasions and at some places where they do, it seems to be too much of a trouble for us! Why go up and down? Just wave your hand and barge into the chaos, fate will take care of you and the motorist!

I sincerely try many a times not to follow suit and am successful most of the times. But there are times when you forget about everything and join in the bandwagon. That is where India lags behind and I fast forward zip, zap zoom…