Day 110 - (Un)Common Sense

It has been an interesting week.  I did find a way out of the maze of priorities that I found myself at the turn of the last week.  Help came in the form of Sukumar Subramaniam! 

However, the more interesting happenings for me this week have been outside the ambit of my life.  The IPL and its workings are being unravelled as an outcome of the Tharoor - Modi war!  And what a cesspool it is!  The brand is taking a beating.  I am absolutely certain now that some of these matches (if not most) are actually staged and fixed.  Alas, cricket is no longer a gentleman's game.  The other interesting stand-off has been between two regulatory bodies in the country.  SEBI and IRDA are at loggerheads on who should be regulating the ULIPs.  Assume there is more to it than just jurisdictional insecurity.  Ego is at play; otherwise this one would not have been fought so publicly.  Poor Pranabda has a task at hand now.

We celebrated Priyanksh's birthday on Friday with friends and family.  After the cake cutting, along with the dinner, some very dangerous rides were on the menu at Hakone!  Some of our heads are still spinning.

Drove to Pune on Saturday, to meet the in-laws, and especially my father-in-law who is recovering from a cataract operation.  And it was while driving through the dark tunnels on the Mumbai - Pune Expressway that I decided I was going to write about traffic in Mumbai and the infrastructure thats supports it.

Traffic in Mumbai is insane.  I remember telling a few foreigners about the difference in traffic between Mumbai and Chennai.  Mumbai has more vehicles on the road but the flow of traffic is more organised than Chennai.  I would now like to retract that statement, which was based on my stay in Mumbai during the early few years of this decade.  Mumbai traffic is insane.

Everyone drives very aggressively; like there is no tomorrow.  Everyone wants to be ahead of the other vehicles.  There is no lane discipline, especially on the wider roads of the Eastern and the Western Expressways.  Sometimes, the distance between the vehicles while overtaking etc. actually scares me.  The margin for error is very less.  A millimetre here and there can cause an accident.

Add to this the infrastructure that supports road transport in the city.  There is no doubt that India as a country builds infrastructure on a lag basis, when there is a demand for it.  There is no proactive planning involved.  However, the issue that bugs me is the way the infrastructure is built.  There is no common sense used.  Everything is bare minimum.  There is no thought given to illumination levels, signages, reflectors, etc.  Suddenly, out of nowhere a divider comes into being; there is no reflective paint on it and hence so very difficult to recognise it at night.  Moreso because the illumination levels of our street lights are not only inadequate but pathetic.  Add to that the penchant for drivers to use the high beam (part of the reason to be using it is obviously the inadequacy of the street lights), with no element of common sense in it.  When driving at night in Mumbai, you are practically driving blind, atleast in most of the places.  Lack of adequate signages, and more importantly, inappropriate placement of signages can easily confuse a commuter into taking a wrong exit / missing an exit.  I definitely think people in Chennai who built these have a little more common sense.  It is definitely not due to their liking of the colour yellow that most dividers, reflectors, etc. are well painted in that colour!  :-))  Not sure what can be done to make the authorities smoothen these rough edges when they build roadways.  Hopefully common sense will dawn and prevail some day!

If you are driving in Mumbai, please take it easy.  Life is precious.  Drive safe.

Take care.