Im blogging coz i have time in my hands and have this urge to write so dont wonder how i managed 2 posts in one day.
I was all set to leave for office today. Normal day. Went to the garage to take my bike and it was hard to drag out. Beautiful - flat tyre!. Walked down to the end of the road, found an auto, bargained and got in.
My super auto walla - i decide to call him Palani - why coz he had his auto windshield covered with Lord Muruga's pics. In a few seconds i was sure this was not gonna be a perfect ride to office. The road was empty, well close to empty. Atleast the car in front was 10 metres away which was saying a lot at that time. Well Palani decided i had all the time in the world to reach office. The auto crawled at less than 20 km/hr when the road was empty!!! He continued to crawl while cyclists overtook us. My route to office is simple. Home, Madhya Kailash Signal, IIT, Anna University, Raj bhavan, Alexander Square, SPIC, ABT and bingo i would reach.
He decided to take a shortcut to the main road. A regular shortcut only so i wasnt too surprised. He took another detour which much to my dismay was blocked! Super! Got back to the short cut and somehow reached the main road with a bus almost toppling us over. We reached Madhya Kailash signal. The signal was amber and Palani should have made up his mind whether to cross or not. Which he obviously did not coz he came to a screeching halt some feet after the stop line
Very thoughtful of him to get down and push the auto back, from 5 feet ahead of the Stop line to 2 feet ahead of the stop line. Now by Indian standards (for those returning to India with pseudo accents and pretend that elephants cross the road) even 10 feet is acceptable. The minute Palani pushed the auto back, the policeman himself called and asked the vehicles to advance by 10 feet. I tried hard not to laugh.
We advanced ahead and again the road was pretty empty and Palani was at his slowest best. The next signal saw a traffic jam. The man who so long did not dare overtake a snail, decided to poke his way through the smallest of spaces. I was shocked and also embarrassed coz i could hear a bunch of people swearing at us. Hello im the passenger not the driver!!! A ford Ikon passing by, hurled a bunch of abuses coz our man stuck himeslf so close to the car that even if he moved an inch there would have been a beautiful scar.
Crossed the signal, again the road got a bit free. Three autos overtook us, ripping ahead. Palani, full enthu decided he was a racer and started accelerating. We were probably going at about 40 which still was saying a lot. We were close to office and we had to take a turn under the bridge. What does Palani do - goes straight and forgets that my office was in the opposite direction. After literally jumping on his head, he stopped pushed the vehicle back and took the turn.
My journey was almost done. The road was being laid and was half done. So one side was sort of higher than the other. What does Palani do? One rear wheel on the higher side and one rear wheel on the lower side. Wow! Talk about sense of balance. We had almost reached - Palani did not want me to forget this ride. There was a busstop right outside the road where my office was, the bus was just moving. My great chauffeur for the day, decided he would overtake a moving bus on the right and then take a left turn!!
After some more abuses, we finally turned into the road. I had bargained for a price, i ended up paying 10 bucks extra for showing me every bump that existed on the 5 km ride to office!
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