It was an ordinary day, the office hours dragged by and with each hour the adrenaline kept ebbing and finally I stood up from my seat with my mind completely numb with the mundane activities in the office. This was as far as I could let go, beyond this would only mean the death of the mind and I do not enjoy that idea much.
The time was 7:30 and to be truthful, this was a little early for me, i usually am playing TT at this hour and would have been playing at least for another hour, but the day had been crazy and I decided to leave.
As is to be expected, the 20 km journey was going to be a pain, often felt it would be better to sleep here in the office and live life out of office... would have also tried that had the office been any encouraging to some creativity. Bursts of speed and sudden breaks, cramming for the narrowest of the passages, i trode on with a mechanical precision born out of practise. Music was thudding into my ears from my mp3 player and that somehow kept me going. the roads were loaded with the lorries and buses. Buses that ply from Chennai to other cities in Tamil Nadu.
Half way to my home there is a huge and ambitious flyover project under construction. As ambitious and as relieving as it would be once completed, it was a nightmare during the construction. and that day it was turning out into a nightmarish nightmare. the junction had jammed and we were moving inch by inch from at least 3 kms from that junction.
The problem is that the junction is ultra important... four roads meet there.. one leading to the airport and it was also a highway to down south of Chennai, one was towards Bangalore and again a highway and one towards the bus station and another into the city.
This was nothing new however and with patience and music I amusing myself with people around me. it is certainly interesting to see people under such situations, though you are to become immune to the horns and the swears...
Suddenly there was a huge siren and i turned back to see to my utter horror an ambulance standing a little behind me. Should not have been horrifying as this wan nothing new either. but that day i was getting real wild with the siren and I started wondering what could be done. thought of calling 911 to ask for help to clear the traffic ahead, but later knew that would not help. Also I learnt that the CM was going back home from the airport. and i started wondering what else could be done...
The buses, they were so many in number, so many buses going on that road... all out of town buses and i suddenly remembered that there existed another ring road that connected the bus station to the highway well outside the city.
The buses should have been travelling that route. had they been on that path the roads would have been pretty empty and the ambulance could have gone ahead with ease. Now there was a life hanging in balance and the traffic was preventing the life from living.
At first i was raged against all the people. They were the ones who had fought for the buses to ply this route despite the alternate. They wanted to get into the buses from near to the home and did not want to travel to the station. Pathetic excuse. The roads were real wide almost a 6 laner. the road should have been easily handling the traffic but for the buses. But people wanted comfort, they wanted to catch buses at their doorstep.
How much more blind could they have been, they were ready to get into the bus and then slog it out in the traffic instead of taking an auto or another bus to the station. They were ready to slog out the traffic everyday of their life in order to make it easier on them selves on the rare days that they were going to go out of city. Such insane logic almost always enrages me to the point of murder and then slowly turns into an amusing topic for the sheer stupidity possible by man.
This is where i would have stopped thinking generally laughing it out, but that day the ambulance sound carried a pain into my heart that made me think further....
What in god forsaken hell was the government doing?
If the men had common sense and if they were capable of making intelligent decisions, would we need a government, or rules?
We establish a government because common sense is not at all common and so we want authoritative and intelligent minds running the system.
But the government, it lays a ring road and lets the road go waste, (tax payers money gone down the drain). The reason, they do not want to go against the wishes of the common men, they would loose their votes.
It pains me to an extant that the words to jump to mind to write all these.
Should not the government come with a strong hand saying at least until the completion of the fly over the buses would ply the ring road? how many ambulances and how many lives could be saved?
But no, they would not want to do that.
Our government is ready to consider a plea by a criminal who dared to attack our parliament and it stays the death penalty to the utter horror of the people expecting and pleading justice and at the same time it yields to the pleads of the common men and kills innumerable waiting in the ambulance.
The vote bank seems to play all important roles here.. the criminal had to be let free for getting his communities vote and the patient dieing in the ambulance is any way not going to vote and so who would care?
The government is becoming such an insipid money laundering machine that it brings on a helmet rule making it compulsory for both the driver and the pillion rider and once it has made sure that every one's got the helmets it relaxes it down. It took one whole day for the government to earn 2.5 crores in the name of fine and then the next day it relaxed the rule and from the third day it was back to normal with no helmets seen on the roads..... this is our government.... @#$%^&&***
A tirade went in my head and then the traffic slowly moved ahead and i moved forward too with the ambulance trailing behind me all the way. All the anger from me slowly got swept in the failure of my incapacity to do anything with my thoughts and i was home in another hours time to go straight to me bed, pick up a novel, skip my dinner and read myself into sleep.
Whom do we blame here, the common sense less men? The unspeakably cheap government? or me?
Life goes on.... and that is why i say, Avoid life, it leads to death.
