Pune...

Pune is a weird city, people have their principles and their discipline and yet the traffic sense is as common as common sense. I have been in Pune for 2 days, and in the those 2 days here i have seen more accidents here than I may have seen in a whole year in Mumbai, despite the higher number of vehicles in Mumbai, going at higher speeds.

Journey to pune is always surreal, accompanied by a huge excitement and "i-cant-wait-to-get-there" syndrome for obvious reasons. But this time around, for the first time, i didn't realize how the time went by because before i knew it we were off the expressway. i found myself looking at the watch and commenting on how it was typical that the one time i am not coming here just to meet Aditi, i come here in 2.5 hrs flat. Lady luck it seems has a cruel sense of humor because about 10 minutes after this incident my bus happened to knock out a cyclist. I dint really have the courage to get up... these kinda incidents and sights in real life scare me (Anybody who has seen me play a video game, specifically the action/RPG/FPS genre will disagree). Finally, after picking my balls off the floor i did go and check out the "victim". Looked like he had minor injuries- a concussion or two, but man was he dazed. I mean, being hit by a bus and surviving is a big deal, but being hit by a Volvo B7R and surviving is nothing short of a miracle.

For the uninformed, the Volvo B7R is a behemoth when it comes to buses. These beasts average around ~100 Kph on the expressway ( i have my own, more or less accurate method of clocking them :) ). The ease with which these buses accelerate just shows efficiency of the monsters they have in their bellies. I have seen BEST drivers give way to these buses, and THAT i know is a sign, a clear augury of sorts, that these are not machines to be trifled with. And yet the "victim" actually walks up into the ambulance.

The irony of the whole situation was that as bad as his luck (or the degenerating neurons in his cranium) may have been, to be hit by B7R; there was no way under the sun would he have survived the accident had it been any other bus. Swedish engineering saved his life.

Another thing which impressed me was the lack of time between the accident and the transfer of the "victim" to the hospital, and the overall management of the situation on the whole. All this while i have put victim in quotations, because I really cant decide who's victim he was. The old man was at fault, a national highway is no place to be going across the traffic on a bicycle. So was the government for not really barricading a national highway. Needless to say at that moment the driver and the cleaner fled the scene, and were untraceable when after much deliberation we decided to hitch a ride into Pune city.

Frankly, i think that (=entering pune city) was the scariest part of the whole journey. I would take my chances going against the direction riding a bicycle on a runway while an Airbus A380 is taking off or landing, than expose myself in the chaos which has a name - Pune. I would have liked to enlist the problems with the traffic in Pune, but that would be too taxing a task. But among the first things Pune needs to do is get all those two wheelers off the roads, and get a public transport mode which is more convenient than the junk heap which is affectionately called the PMT or the PCMT. The roads really aren't bad, they just need more traffic cops, even corrupt ones will do, in fact preferably corrupt ones. The kind who will have enough incentive to pull over even the most trivial offense.

Anyhow, I just got my hands on a bag of pop-corn, and some guava nectar, and policy making and improving a city are things that come in the way of hedonism :).