Whoever said ‘if you follow your passion, you discover happiness’… is not true in all circumstances… one of my passions is driving and I claim that I can be at ease driving anything, anywhere, anytime, anyhow… being behind wheels is an absolute stress buster for me… be it heavy (standstill) traffic or disruptive weather or irreparable roads, never mattered so much as long as I had control of the wheel with some good company.. or alone with good music on…

All this till I started driving in this city of Bangalore… and once a stress-buster has now become such a stressful exercise… everyday morning getting to work (technically a four minutes drive from home, not a second more!!) is like a forty minute abusive crusade, cruising (criss-crossing) through the lanes and by-lanes of this city… everytime that I have to drive from one place to the other, the first question “should I take the main road or the short-cut lanes and by-lanes” and I don’t get an answer to this till I reach the destination… reason is simple: there seems to be no difference between both of them…

1. Traffic on the main roads comes to standstill due to non-functional and chaotic signals and traffic on inner lanes comes to a standstill due to chaotic lane-cutting (there is just one lane anyways !!)… doesn’t matter if the traffic cops are there or not… no one pays heed to them anyways!!
2. I get lost on main roads because of so many one-ways, none of them leading to my destination and I get lost on the lanes/bylanes as well due to my limited knowledge of layouts /ringroads /3rd phase /8th Main /6th cross and so on.. all of them look similar and equally confusing to me!!
3. Whether it’s the main roads or the lanes and bylanes of this city, both serve as ‘freeways’ to the two-wheelers… people riding these two-wheelers are the focal point of my abuses while driving… they are gifted with a knack of maneuvering their wheels into the smallest of gaps, choking the already congested traffic, with/without knocking our cars, leaving drivers like me gasping for breath…
4. There is no differentiation between the road and the pavement/footpath or even drains for that matter… the stretch from one shop/wall to the one opposite it is used as a road and everything movable and immovable is right in between there trying to adjust maadi…