Urban Travelling

Come this long Diwali weekend, a whole lot of people from Bangalore who are residents of places elsewhere are getting ready to take that long train/bus/plane/bullock cart journey back home, hoping to spend substantial quality time with their near and dear ones.

This is one of the phenomena that I have come to observe with irritating regularity about these long weekends, where it becomes very tough to move around. One can't visit restaurants in the afternoons or evenings because they are choc-a-block full of holidaying families, who are taking a welcome respite from their regular cooking-at-home ventures.

The regular bachelor's bastions are blatantly violated and most of us ordinary dudes that subsist on some decent wholesome high-calorie and high-fat, absolutely non-nutritious food have to resort to other means to subsist, incuding our own cooking, at the very worst which under most circumstances can be more dangerous to health than eating at a roadside stall.

Travelling aroud becomes a problem as tickets everywhere are booked in advance, and any sort of travel even to a short distance needs to be undertaken at one's own peril with no guarantees of being able to reach the destination on time, if at all reaching the destination can be considered a possibility.

The prospect of travel is quite a luxury for the average middle-class Indian family, that resorts to only particular instances during which a long family trip can be undertaken. Tell me about it, I've had first hand experiences, that have, like every single thing I can associate with family in retrospect, been among the most fun times I have had in my life.

As times have changed and people have higher purchasing power, and as the very concept of leisure is kicking in with greater force as people work harder than they are supposed to, more weekend getaways are in the offing and the concept of day-tripping has become very relevant in today's scenario, specially with the IT industry techies that have cars and money to burn on fuel.

Its nice to take a weekend trip and go off and have fun, but travelling all the days in a week can be a major pain in the ass.

Just the other day, a friend of mine had come over to visit me, and he and I decided to take a random bike ride in the dead of the night to visit the Coffee Day at Whitefield. A natural aversion to all things 'hep' in general and to the Coffee Day brand in particular was not a deterrent for me to want to go visit the eastern part of the city that I had lived in for the past two years, that I had not yet seen so far.

We set off at around 12:30 AM on the bike and after scrounging around for some fuel at a petrol bunk on Brigade road that was open all the time, we were well on our way towards ITPL. Its funny, but I hadn't till then seen the two major places that has placed Bangalore on the tech map - Electronics city as well as Whitefield and ITPL, where most of the major IT firms have setup shop.

I guess the comfort of being ensconed on an office on Mysore road, far away from the maddening IT crowd, being so close to my home back in Mysore had brought in me the inertia that prevented me from going to see those places until that fateful day when my friend and I had a whole lot of time to kill.

The bike ride, in some ways changed some part of me forever. The discussions that he and I had ranged from our country's socio-political scenario to Jennifer Love Hewitt, and we had a fun time all in all.

At the same time, the ride to Whitefield and its assorted areas in the vicinity was something that made me realize that I have a strong sense of intuition, because I now knew why I wasn't anxious to go visit the place and see it at all.

Dusty roads after the Marathalli road - Outer Ring Road junction across that narrow bridge, being flanked on either side by these bleak and dreary apartments that were under construction, and that would be hell to live in for the occupants that would be willing to pay a high price for posh accommodation at such a 'pristine location' on a desolate stretch of road that otherwise was choking with traffic was what met my eye.

The term - 'concrete jungle' was never so applicable before, and the true extent of how Bangalore has grown really kicked in within me as I saw the place. I must confess that there is nothing as depressing as urban travelling in Bangalore.

I feel a great sense of outrage at the fact that a lot of my contemporaries have to undertake that long and dreary journey on a daily basis to earn a living. As techies in the Indian IT industry, they do form an elite bunch of people with above-average salaries, and are mollycoddled no end so far as the privileges conferred upon them are concerned, but the mind numbing journey that one needs to take both ways, leaving no time for actually having a life outside of work makes me angry.

Angry, for the simple reason that our countrymen, who have so much more potential than to actually dance to the tunes of a master offshore who is looking for a low-cost alternative solution to meet his business needs, are forced to do nothing but, while there is a lot more that we can do and accomplish on a personal or a professional level if only we have the time and are given ample opportunities to make some for ourselves.

It is either a testament to our resilience or our ability to do anything for the sake of a few dollars more (choose your own viewpoint) that drives most of us to undertake that long journey each day, day in and day out, without respite.

This is not intended to offend those that work so far away, its merely an attempt to empathize if it is necessary. However, it might just be so that people working so far away are used to this and are thus not too affected by the long bus journey.

Hope things will improve someday. Maybe then, a visit to the Whitefield Coffee Day can actually be undertaken in the day time without having to worry too much about traffic.

Until then, count your blessings.