Traffic woes

I had been to Ritchie street today afternoon to get a hardware part fixed in my laptop. The fix took only about fifteen minutes, but the commute time was more than 3 hours to reach Ritchie street and come back home. Roads are blocked and vehicles diverted within the city (Chennai) for the metro rail construction. Roads with 4 lanes are reduced to just a passage that's big enough only for a single vehicle to pass. While i drove back, i thought that the mount road will be lane of vehicular chaos and took the beach road. I then understood that it was an experience of jumping onto the stove from the Pan. Vehicles were moving at a snail's pace with lot of vehicles coming in a cool way in the opposite direction. I now understand the reason for the frequent accidents on the beach road with buses and cars ramming vehicles coming in the opposite direction. I should thank Ilayaraja for helping me to keep my cool through out those 2 hours of nerve wrecking traffic chaos. Chennai seems to be in a transformation phase right now with the construction of the pillars and tracks for the metro rail. The plan seems to cover the busiest stretches of the city. I presume the city's transportation system will get a major face lift once the metro rail becomes  operational. Phase 1 may get completed by the end of 2013. The hope is that the car & two wheeler users will reduce their road usage with the advent of the metro rail system. Wherever available, electric trains seem to be the quickest means of transportation within the city. I am very hopeful that most of the vehicle users would prefer using this new means of transport instead of getting tormented by the traffic chaos to save a couple of minutes. So, the only option right now is to keep our patience intact while traversing through the main roads of the city and wait for the metro dawn.

Diwali Again

This year's Diwali is around the corner. The city is as usual ready to embrace  the festival of lights with a delightful fervor. I already see placards outside popular sweet stalls stating that they are ready to take bulk orders for sweets. When i was young(in school), buying sweets from a stall was not very common and there were not so many sweets shops around as they exist today. Unlike other festivals, sweets used to be made in large quantities at least 2 weeks before the festival. I came home everyday with my tongue trickling with droplets of saliva and taste buds ready to devour the variety of sweets that were made at home. Things changed a bit afterwards. Distributing sweets to employees in offices especially for Diwali became a practice  Both my parents were employed and, we waited for the sweet boxes they would bring home. We sometimes snatched those boxes from our parents while on the way, even before they could reach home. We relished them more as they would have exotic varieties of sweets than what my mother knew to make at home. For crackers, my father's office had a cooperative society that sold crackers at a price slightly lesser than the market prices. I would keep inquiring my father about the date on which the stalls would open lest i miss anything on my list as the crackers used to get sold out in those cooperative stalls very quickly. Buying crackers used to be done with so much fanfare at that time. We discussed in our friends circle as to when each of us will be buying crackers. At times, i used to take friends for buying crackers. What an happiness that was. Even crores of rupees would not get us back those days or the feeling. The energy and the spirit have dwindled down over the years. We don't celebrate now. But the fervor seems to be less. Today, I see even kids refraining from lighting crackers now as they are told by their teachers that child labor is involved. But i am pretty sure that these kids miss the excitement and amusement that we expected and enjoyed every moment on that day. Most of the time, Ignorance is Bliss.