Driving ethics and traffic control

Chaos in Hinjewadi flyover –

An year and a more has passed ever since I set my foot on the soil of Pune. Way back in January, I used to reach my office in 15 minutes. I still reside at the same place and my office also is at the same place. Only difference that today I reach my office in an hour or sometimes 2 hours also. Hinjewadi has always been a matter of speculation when it comes to traffic. One must view the sight at 8:30 in the morning, of at the least 200 vehicles, lined one behind the other, waiting for the chaos of traffic jam to diffuse. Same view is telecast in the evening at 6:15. When the traffic becomes severe, people attribute the reasons to festivities. Folks!even on normal days, the scenario is no different. Now that one of the roads leading to Dange chowk has been blocked, lately there has been a terrible problem in travelling to office, specially for the 2 wheelers. Initially, this issue was taken quite lightly. But ever since my roommate witnessed a gory gruesome accident of a motorcyclist, who was hit and run over by a truck, and was dead on the spot, I felt an urge to write about this.

Traffic jam is a never ending problem in Pune. The city has not been designed to hold a population that it is accommodating today. Being a star city in education and an expansively growing IT hub, it is becoming more or less like Mumbai with only difference of infrastructure which lacks in this beautiful city of hills. The roads are not so wide that they fail to contain such a surfeit of vehicles. Above all, adding more problems, I have seen, people here do not have a proper driving sense. And nor is the traffic strict here. This is the case, not only in the outskirts of city like Hinjewadi, but similar Pandora boxes are inevitable even inside the city. People seem to be in such a hurry always that they fail to see people around them. They drive such that every lil space on the road has to be covered up and that creates a plethora of problems for the poor traffic police who have no planned strategy to tackle this issue. In Hinjewadi, day by day, the crisis is getting complicated all the more. With two more techno parks that would be coming to life in Wakad, in a few months to come, the IT head count would increase haphazardly and then managing that kind of traffic in that narrow road will worse than a nightmare.

First of all, there is nothing much that can be done for infrastructure as it has already been planned. So what can be done is that people must inculcate a proper driving sense inside them. The traffic police need to be more alert and must be prepared for any kind of problems that can arise due to the traffic. They must be ruthless with the people breaking the traffic rules. Otherwise the fear to wrong an ethic or break a rule will never be indoctrinated in a person. Nowadays, in Pune, people who break rules survive better than people who follow rules well. Though the roads are narrow, they still could be managed well only if people take a lil more care while driving. It is high time that people open their eyes to the hard reality and prevent even small accidents.

Remember – “Life is a gift. And it is gifted only once.”

What could have been the last thoughts of that motorcyclist who is no more? Has anyone thought? It gives everyone a chill down their spine as such a calamity can befall anyone. Life is already so unpredictable. So why take it so lightly?

What is more important is to be a responsible citizen who rather than following the rule – “Rules are meant to be broken” must follow the rule – “Live and let live”

Metaphors of life.....part 1 ~ Childhood chronicles

Feeings of a child.....straight from heart.....
She has been gifted with a tiny round face…..distinctly round and small. Her brown eyes are too big for that tiny face and her mouth too small to be held firmly by her average lips, that when it smiles, one could get a front view of all the teeth God has given her. Her eyebrows arch well above her eyes and her face looks healthier due to the tough cheeks that always become more prominent when she grins…..As she grew, she grew with lot of questions in mind, some which she dint comprehend…..for the first 2 years of her life, she only listened. And then after, only others listened. She grew up as an obedient child, who followed whatever her mom and dad said and taught her. But a deep rooted seed of rebellion lay dormant inside her ever since she was born……

She loved to play the typical childish games like the Police-Thief and so on where she at times relished being the thief and at times, relished being the police and at times both. She loved to sit on the swing and take the feel of touching the sky. She loved to watch the stars and had then assumed that stars are made of big chunks of ice and had even dreamt of having eaten a lump of it. She had then taken a special interest in astronomy….She loved to spend the evenings with her friends and her Sunday evenings were always special as her father used to take her out on his bike to the zoo and the snake park where, she used to ask her father a lot about those caged animals and had one day finally asked why were they caged after all when they were also made by the same God who made us. Not knowing how to make his only child understand, he had just told her that they were dangerous and they could harm people if let outside. She was not convinced though, but she took a deep interest in snakes and their life. As they hissed violently, she shook in fear. Somehow the feeling mixed with her obsession with snakes and the fear of them had got rooted inside her forever. She loved them as much as she loathed them. It was a feeling which she could not understand at her innocent age of 4. Otherwise as a very normal kid, she loved to sit on her mother’s lap and do her lessons and at night, loved to listen to the bed time stories recited by her adoring mother……She seemed to be a perfect obedient child…..!!!!!

One fine sunny morning, she was standing in front of a tall lean woman who was sitting on a chair. The woman had an oblong face with long cold eyes that were staring into her soft brown eyes menacingly. It was the third time the madam had asked her to recite the poem and she bluntly refused for the third time with a droplet of tear trickling down her cheek from her left eye. But her eyes had something to say. Her eyes din synchronize with the face she made. It was as if they were mocking the woman’s demur…..”Ask as many times as u want. I wont reply back to u!”. The woman leaned back with a sigh, put a big zero in the girl’s marksheet and asked her to take her place. When the girl returned home, her ever apprehensive mother asked her how it went. She din reply. Neither did she feign sadness. Rather she behaved as usual. A moody character that she had grown up into, it was at times rather difficult for her parents even to assume things. Soon as the days went by, her mother came to know the results and she was not able to believe that her daughter had not performed well, rather had performed so badly to have got a big zero. On summoning her only child, the mother looked into her soft eyes and asked as kindly as she could as to why she landed with a fail rather than pass when she had known the poem so well. (At home, she had recited it so well that had not her mother seen the marksheet, she would not have believed anyone). The child replied with a quick defiance that came so easily to her – “I don’t like the teacher”. The mother was left dumbfounded by that answer, even more troubled to see that the moodiness of these years had started affecting her academics. The seed of rebellion, that had been dormant inside the 4 year old girl for so long, had just begun to germinate…..