Bangalored!

27-Feb-2006
The day starts off in Mumbai with the silence shattered by the insistent chime of the alarm. It is still dark; as dark as one would expect it to be at 4:30 a.m. Motivating myself to motivate Vaibhav to wake up feels like running the final stretch of a 42 km marathon up a 30 degree incline.

After dropping Vaibhav at Kora Kendra bus stop for the bus to Pune, I am dropped home on Ram’s bike. He tells me from first hand experience that Bangalore is better than Pune. I am surprised and tell him that it is for the first time that I am hearing it the other way round!

Cut to the Kingfisher flight to Bangalore (Bengalooru? Bengaluru?) in which I have Sachin (of the TV program ‘Naach Baliye’) as my adjacent seat passenger. He is so ordinary looking that I would surely not notice him in a crowd of two people. After landing, I get into a pre-paid taxi to Hotel Ramanashree. On my way out of the airport, a guy offering a free-for-life credit card accosts me. I laugh and decline, but think that the guy should be credited for coming up with an innovative place to sell his wares!

The taxi driver is very courteous – I will soon find out that his big smiles and soft talk is not a flash in the pan, but runs through hotel staff, oracle receptionist, even support staff and security guards at Oracle. A queer thing I notice is that most vehicles kill their engines at signal stops. I notice this only because it is so unusually silent inspite of so many cars around. Also there are a high number of traffic cops manually directing the show rather than letting the lights do the singing.

Now all of us have heard about the traffic nightmare in Bangalore. Well, I must count myself lucky not to have experienced this first hand yet, but what I do notice is that a number of streets are one-way streets. This seems to be a stopgap solution for traffic woes. Must mention though, that even after making the roads one way, these are still not broad enough to decongest the growing traffic population.