The great Bangalore road saga

Its one-way or no way.  Once you have stayed long enough in Bangalore, regular two way traffic of other cities will start to baffle you.  You will even start popping questions like “Why are we taking the same route to go back?  Are you sure you know your way around?”  You will even become sceptical of the driving skills of others and start questioning their sense of direction and motives.

Although every city in India has a left side driving, only in Bangalore does one single road outside the busiest shopping mall, twists all norms and changes direction from left to right side driving.  We are cool like that!

And our biggest nemesis on the roads are the auto-rickshaw drivers.  These are people who have dedicated their lives towards teaching citizens the virtue of patience and self-control.  Even after you might have been declined a ride by 20 auto rickshaws (in a span of 10 minutes), being in Bangalore, you will have gained such tremendous levels of understanding that you will still wait for another 20 auto rickshaws to come and go.  You will find them chanting words of wisdom like “one-and-a-half-meter”, “rupees 20 extra” and sometimes an amount so exorbitant (for a 5 minute ride) that the mere shock of it will take you towards enlightenment.

(*** please read “potholes” for every mention of the term “roads”)

If Cinderella can, so can we

If your regular day involves leaving home at wee hours to beat the traffic, working for 12-14 hours, beating bumper-to-bumper evening traffic and still being able to make it for a drink with friends before the Cinderella hours, then you are definitely in Bangalore.  Yes, our music stops by 10 pm and all night life halts at 11:30 pm, but we still know how to let our hair down in style.  Courtesy our law and order, we have now been well trained to party hard and still be able to go to bed at a decent hour.  How many cities can manage that, eh?  Well, even Cinderella needed till midnight before making a dash for home, but we are more time-savvy than her.  Ours is a time sensitive “Fairy-tale”.

Stockholm Syndrome? Nah, its Bangalore Syndrome

We crib for almost about everything in Bangalore, the roads, the traffic, the commute and even the power cuts, and yet we share a complex “Ross-Rachel” relationship with this city.  No one, I repeat, no one else apart from its citizens is allowed to criticize our city.  One word uttered in criticism will be met by fierce backlash followed by a feature-film length lecture on how this is the best city in the world.  Do you really understand the song lyrics “You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave”?  We live it every day.  We may hate many things here, but we don’t ever want to go anywhere else either.  We are head over heels in love with the city’s weather, draught beer, food (that is what we live for), multi-cultural diversity, the “maadi” suffix to every second word and even the allergic sneeze attacks.  We love it all and we are proud of it!