Revving into Madness

Fridays are usually utilized, in office, planning the weekend parties. However, life is not so hunky dory on other weekdays, wherein, we have to put in some productive time for the company, daily. Now productivity is an obstacle as huge as the late Anna Nicole Smith’s – Life; for guys and girls, who have to commute up to 15/20 kms (one way) daily, on their bikes / in their cars in a city like Pune.

To ride/drive in Pune is not only exhausting, but is a kind of torture that not even the fascist inventors of concentration camps or the communist inventors of labor camps could have imagined.

They say, ‘Man usually tries to find order in chaos,’ we try to make way in it. And God bless the traffic wardens of our city. I used to actually buy cigarettes but now I get ample amounts of carbon monoxide free for inhaling and enjoying the bliss of smoking 20 cigarettes a day in just an hour’s time. The best part is that you don’t even have to blow the smoke out. Everything including the toxic gases exhausted is completely inhaled, totally corroding the respiratory system up, Government’s innovative way of keeping pollution under control.

Daily, I start an hour beforehand for office. 30 minutes to ideally reach the office and 30 minutes for traffic signals, bickering with other commuters, negotiating with police wardens (if your number plates are of outside Maharashtra, you have had it!) and teaching the rickshaw wallahs a thing or two about road discipline.

If you want to survive on Pune streets, you have to learn a thing or two about how the traffic and the people, who create it, function. The first lesson is to apply Newton’s third law of motion, ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction.’ Two types of gesticulations are salient features of each and every minor accident (when people bang each other near traffic signals at speed of 5KM/HR, or at crossings and circles etc). The outward palm, meekly mouth, wide grinned ‘SORRY’ and the inward palm, snarling faced ‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING’ gestures.

If you are at fault, do the ‘Sorry’ gesture because the other party has already shown you the latter, ‘the cultured middle finger action’ and vice a versa.

Now the positive part about riding in Pune is that there is no dearth of beautiful girls riding around wearing multicolored terrorist masks. While going to office, you have no scope of seeing who the chick is, in the morning (they wear glares too). But while coming back, you can fall in love at first sight for ample number of times. So many eye-tems to choose from, hee hee!

Extreme concentration and caution is necessary while driving though. Some times the signals are hidden and if you mistakenly jump them, quite possibly the traffic warden is hidden somewhere. In such a scenario you quickly have to hide your wallet and use the ‘Sorry’ gesture again. However, if you are from the city itself and have been riding for couple of years then no need to worry, most of Pune population considers signals are randomly flickering assortment of lights, which would have served a better purpose in discos and pubs than on streets. Jumping signals, like freedom, is their birth right. No disrespect meant to the great freedom fighter here.

You also need to be an expert in urgent or emergency braking, including optimum use of hand brakes (for cars only). There are adventure freaks and adrenaline junkies in abundance in Pune who would gesture you the stop sign, in the middle of the road, as they jay walk. However I sympathize with the jay walkers, as almost 40 % of the vehicles stop at the signals, past the Zebra crossings. The rest 60% are busy jumping the signals and the jay walkers. Such is their (jay walker’s) dilemma and skill that they could give tough competition to the suicide-ing Vidharbha cotton farmers and Russian trapeze artists. After it’s a life and debt, err, death situation.

Now if you can’t handle all this, think twice before relocating to Pune. But if you can drive with such haste and hurry as if you have been suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, Welcome to Pune, no place like it on Earth. BTW, I loved every day of my stay in the city, that’s 4 years altogether. And I am not trying to be diplomatic. Just being Pune-kar.