Rukhi aidiyoon main ab bas rahi hai duniya,
Aankhein jee rahi hain, roz ek naya qissa.
Naye log, naye hai ehsaas,
Jeevan jeene ka yeh nav-abhaas
Drishy jo kitni bar-dekh, bhi andekhein the,
Saamay ki ankahi dhool main, dafne the,
Muskaan ki jhurriyoon main aaj ubhar rahe hain.
Meri gheri, pehli, swach swaas.
Nivritt, here, implies freedom from responsibility, retirement.
Ek bewafaai aur mili tumhari jeb se,
Siahi ke nishaan, ek muchade hue bill pe.
Kuch der sambhale rakha unhe,
Maine apne mathe ki shikan pe.
Befikr nazar churai tumne,
Main bhi muskura di,
Tumhare lateefe ki ot main,
Din ka varnan, awaaz main hasee aur ulass.
Chaha tumse pooch hi lu aaj,
Laboon tak laakar, rukh gayi kitni baar.
Goonj us sawaal ki,
Shanka mere mann Ki
Kitne kadam door ho tum, es dayere paar
Us siahi ko toh baha diya maine,
Katra katra kar, jeeni hogi, ab yeh daraar.
We 20Mn+ Delhites, please allow me the luxury to extend the definition to lesser mortals of NCR too, are proud owners of 8.9Mn vehicles. Vehicles, that ply on roads clogged by traffic. Traffic, that belongs to it and some that doesn’t: Pedestrians, Strays, Hawkers, Pavement houses, Construction, Dumpsters, Unammned check posts, Broken down trucks, Trees for shrines. Traffic powered by machine, humans and animals.
Oh, am otherwise in awe of the wide, and the very rare experience of, uninterrupted roads of Delhi. To chance upon the later, is a fairy tale. We are often blamed for Indian Stretchable Time. Truth be told, it’s not of volition. Waddling through traffic and the harrowing task to find a parking is no small feat. I recollect leaving my car to be towed for lack of both a parking spot & time to reach the interview with Microsoft at Cyber City, Gurgaon. An ocean of offices swamped with an ever increasing school of employees and of course, negligible parking. The other time I did find parking in the bylanes, my patrician stilettoes gave up on the cobbled dusty track. Then there is, carpeting, to save you from the embarrassment of grating heels.
Life goes on, at the rate of 4 hours of daily commute to and fro work, since. Am no exception. Those who live in spitting distance are not better off either. Well, I say that because they spend inordinate time covering a short distance. This regular life of mine is often interrupted, by the likes of wedding season. 20,000 weddings on a single day! While it might tell you the obvious, about the exploding traffic and potential mating population, I am perplexed to know that there are so many eligible men out there! Who are these people? Where are their watering holes? How come ‘I’ have not spotted these unicorns! Then we have festivals, VIPs, maintenance, construction stalemate and religion. Be warned Kanvarias and Chhat puja can dent you! Speaking of dents, virgin cars in Delhi are a myth.
In my ranting thus far I have not spoken about anything you did not know. Although, I may have been able to evoke empathy, by stating the obvious. Doing so was not the intention but admittedly is quite charming of me.
This write-up could have well been about air pollution due to traffic but then healthy lungs, chirping birds and green earth move few to action. Selfishness, can and does. Let us pivot this around us; our comfort, time, money & life. Now we should be better prepared to lend an ear and a thought.
It is also easier & natural to expect, after all we pay taxes; we elect. We have paid for infrastructure development, salaries of cops and waivers for violations. We should have better roads, faster construction, improved connectivity, flawless enforcement of traffic rules, pavements for cyclists, overhead bridges, shelters for the homeless, sheds for the stray and Santa Claus.
There are things “they” , the other partridges, can do. Lane driving, abide by signal, respect distance & your vehicle, be less ear-splitting, get that black hose of hell fixed, give way to the emergency siren, to start with. I am sure you have your asks.
Then there are some things we can do. Of course we do them already; not give into road rage & profanity, acknowledge our mistake, time our travel- but then again there are no off-peak hours I know of anymore.
Also, there are real solutions that do not require investments or infrastructure. Some solutions dangle the carrot, some whip the stick, others, do neither.
Here are the 15 Ideas that I can think of to reduce traffic and save you some money, time & life:
A Case for Car Pooling
Car Pool
This can be done informally at an individual level, formally by large organizations and monetized by 3rd part technology solution providers via apps. Carpooling, Letsride & Pool Circle
Shared Taxi Service
Why can’t the radio taxis not add a feature of multiple pick-ups and drops on the same route. Some will take it, few every day, others will cringe. Here is how UberPool works.
Single Passenger Hours
Disallow single passenger vehicles to ply during certain hours. If not disallow, make it prohibitively expensive.
Cap cars/person
Increase tax liability, charge higher registration, higher loan rates for second car. And the whip cracks!
Dangle the Public Transport carrot
Income Tax relief. Student concession. Loyalty cards. Reward points for Metro kms.
Meter the Autos!
Create an economical option for people to use. If autos charge this steeply & arbitrarily, I might as well buy my Nano.
Technology at help: Automated real time heat map
Spot the congestion, avoid it like plague. No need for twitter and radio updates, most of which are awfully incorrect.
Shared transfers
Hotspots like offices, marketplaces, theatres, parks can have shared transfers at standardized rates that ply frequently. Metro being the hub, hotspots the spokes.
Promote Work from Anywhere
Why incent individuals alone when you can influence the culture they work in. Reward companies where employees enjoy a work from home.
Do telemarketers need to be in office?
Use collaborative workspaces to plug and well, play.
Flexible work hours
Let the cogs decide the hours that work for them. The company and the manager should care for the output.
Company transport
Facilitate busses and cabs. Charge them if required, but nominally.
Car Pooling Alliance
If there can be coopetition why can’t offices in the same zone or building come together. This serves as company transport with centralized security and logistics. Small businesses benefit! Win-Win.
Preferred housing
Allocate preferred societies for employees to stay at. Give them a reason to live there; benefits. Membership to gym, compensation component, schooling for children, doctor on call, Life balance. High density of employees in an area = economical and efficient shuttle service.
Be Draconian:
Allocate days when odd and even registration number plates cannot ply.
Don’t turn right on the green light.
A lot amongst these ideas may need organizational or policy level support. A few are fledgling, others growing wings. Then, there are those you can excuse as a thing of my late evening, hyperactive imagination. What I hope though is that it leaves you with food for thought and me with a comment on how you think we can solve for traffic congestion.
When it came to taking a second language, for boards, the hoity-toity had, French. As much as, the bourgeois bug appealed to me, I had to resign to Hindi “A”. Then, I had kicked myself for not having scored lesser, so that I could have been assigned to the batch of Hindi “B”. The scholarly subscribed to Sanskrit- oh boy, for that cramming! I have a fundamental disconnect with the whole, memorizing without understanding, school of education, but addressing that would merit an entire post. Honestly, I would have opted for neither French, nor Sanskrit, or the long tail German, Russian, and more. It’s the lack of choices, which sets you off on the “what if” mode. Sometimes, no option is not such a bad option, after all. It makes life simple.
In my brushes with Bengali and Gurmukhi, I learnt to read and write them. Speaking was another league, a preposterous one. Cat got my tongue, voice box would collapse, heart beat and swimming head competed to win the dash, eyes shied away from contact. It remains, a different league.
The task at hand, then, was to prepare sufficiently enough to decode the examination. Put a bunch of symbols together to, string essays, long answers, stories, letters to score 40 or 44/100. Modus operandi – out of the examination hall, out of mind. Admittedly, it was an art. An art of, shallow learning. On the brighter side, your formative years expose you to endless abilities, most of which you are not aware of and look back at, with bewilderment. As we mature we give in to self-doubt. Self-doubt, that stems from a constant monologue in our head telling us “now we know better- we were kids then-boundless” Interestingly, that ability to do unthinkable things is easy to replicate. Look at what one was a couple of years back, and the same feeling takes over-how did I do it then?
Little flair for languages has been a challenge, but am not willing to throw away presents from my past. Rekindling the literature which seems blurred and far.
Despite, English acing the list, there is always room for improvement. Improvement, which translates not into a bigger better basket of words, but a creative use of it. Romancing the language.
India is a land of abundant knowledge. The diversity we read about in our civics textbooks manifests in each family teaching children English, Hindi and a native language. Well, the idea is to neither generalize the first two nor their order but to state that on an average an educated Indian is conversant with three languages. Impressive.
In my case, am not too pleased that despite being of Sikh origin my first rendezvous with Gurmukhi was not until 8th grade, for a brief 4 months. Clearly, I could do away with it being so foggy. Read and understand the vaakh at gurudwara sahib without squirming. Shed the inhibition to speak, get the inflections, intonation and pronunciation right.
Hindi, is a different story all together. Somewhere the colonial hangover left Hindi with drooping shoulders, robbing us of pride in our own literature. Sound education, intelligence, sophistication were and if I may add, are the reserves of the English speaking. Hypocritical and biased. Hindi to me is hypnotic. Casual conversation with locals outside of the metro cities, profound deliveries by theater actors, riveting expressions of orators, storytelling by poets and writers has enticed me into rediscovering Hindi. Rediscovering Hindi is like rediscovering yourself, re-connecting, grounding, dusting off the bells and whistles. Speaking more of Hindi makes me feel warmer and connect better. Some expressions just cannot be translated, they are priceless as originals. True for all languages. Often we think in one language, translate that thought into writing or speech of another. I want to learn to think in the language.
Bengali’s are easy to spot. Perhaps a function of their accent, cliquishness, love for travel, cultural nuances, amongst many others. Revival of my dexterity in Bengali can go a long way in deciphering conversations my friends and colleagues indulge in – my field of marketing and advertising is besieged with the fraternity. More importantly, bond with the domestic help. Most importantly, it is a low hanging fruit when it comes to a language I have learnt to read and write in the past.
Sanksrit, is highbrow. It is a root language and to be able to do justice one must not be of fleeting interest, lend depth. Admittedly, I don’t fit the bill.
Indian languages are too inviting and have caught my fancy. The relationship began with the inescapable syllabus but has mushroomed into a promising canvass of understanding and connecting better with people. High on my wish list is Gujarati, Urdu and finally one international language, Spanish
While I get more conversant with English and Hindi, renew my familiarity with Gurmukhi and Bengali, explore Gujarati, Urdu and Spanish am cognizant that there are only so many languages I can unbox. The truest and most compelling are, unspoken languages- that of dance, music, emotions, art, sports and more. They germinate from our mind, body and soul! Universal.
Summarizing with Quotes
A tribute to my 3rd languages across schools:
Thinking in a language: being a purist
“Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.” ‒Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.”‒Rita Mae Brown
On my inhibition to speak another language
On learning multiple languages
Universal languages
Every cent you take
You give back a dollar.
Every moment you fake,
You get closer to reality.
Its all about un-thought unscrupulous mortality.
Deathless.
Breathing life into listless insanity.
What really is sanity?
Is the glass half full?
Or egg half broken?
Am I simply an opportunist?
A characterization of contrived adherence?
or a picture of societal free fall?
You will love me tomorrow,
Do you see me with you today?
Time is not uni-dimensional
But a multidimensional mess.
Walking dark alleys,
Silencing poltergeists.
Or is that scream a longing for silence?
Palpable.
Untouched.
or conveniently forgotten?
Delving into condescending duality,
The spell of frivolous lust and greed.
Knowing men are vents for gods sins
HER unpretentious pleasures
His happiness but a mirage.
HER love for him, a masquerade.
And when was it that you saw beyond the almighty’s mask?
HER surreal identity,
His unforgiving hypocrisy,
Both brutal.
I sit by the sidewalk,
Investing cents for a dollar to roll back.
-Jugalbandi @Route04
It was about three weeks back that a concept was actualized.
Experience Delhi.
The genesis of which was a New Year resolution, only it wasn’t an annual one. It was a way of life. After not much deliberation I arrived at self-development. Ideally pursuing a passion should be best suited but I could not seem to find one-a passion, a passion in its truest form. What I discovered although was that I had varied interests, a multitude of activities I enjoyed dabbling in.
I wanted to make time for myself.
Enjoy simple things.
Uncomplicate pleasure.
There always has been joy in doing small things, only this time it was about making memories of those moments.
Living and absorbing.
Meeting friends over drinks and meals isn’t very enriching and engaging, needed something more concrete, something that would genuinely help bond.
It then occurred to me that I had lived in Delhi for a decade if not more but had almost next to never experienced the culture and its richness that it has to offer. Most of its beauty was about living in nostalgia. Thus the ball got rolling and I soon was thoroughly enjoying myself.
25th August-Driving to work it dawned upon me that there would be several like-minded folk who would like to break away from the web of complacency. I could only imagine how exhilarating it would be to have shared experiences. Learn from each other, meet interesting people, enrich one another, dig into our abilities and discover new possibilities. I experienced an adrenaline rush thorugh the day and could not stop thinking about getting started.
Activities spanning from heritage walks followed by breakfast to karaoke, From concerts to theatre, dance recitals to museums, sound & light show to mid-night photography and drives, cookery to pottery workshops, root for your favorite team at a watering hole or go for a game, learn an instrument or learn a language, movie marathon to short get- aways from Delhi, fine dining to rustic culinary indulgence.
Imagine, appreciate, participate, motivate!
Exploring, learning and growing! Together.
The mechanics of it were simple too- initiate a group on Facebook, yes one more amongst the several. The invitation sent to some like-minded people with whom the concept would resonate and only if it excited them would they join. A truly joint effort, a community where everyone contributes, participates and takes initiative. Comfortable being just a handful, even if it means to be able to count us on one hand to begin with.
17th Sep– We met and witnessed bi-polar Delhi at its best!
We see what we want to.
We hear what we desire.
We believe an illusion.
And when the illusion breaks,
Say that the world conspires?
Deception is a strange game.
It relays a vicious cycle.
It plays on the weakest link,
Trust in another,
Until it feeds into your self
The beginning is where it ends.
What you give is what you earn.
What you get is,
Neither fate,
Nor out of turn.
Tied to strings,
Self-professed, oh so detached!
Holding onto the last straw,
That sinks.
Instead,
Believe in oneness and survive.
Definitions and boundaries,
Amorphous principles,
Open to scrutiny and sub-judice.
Collective intelligence,
Limiting individuality,
Pre-ordained paths to happiness.
Crafted concepts of social being.
Subterfuge of who we are
And perception.
Striving for acceptance,
Moving to religion.
Restricting living,
To sheer existence.
One amongst the plenteous stages of evolution
Is self –admission
to ravenous narcissism and intemperance.
Arguably,
love of self is ‘the’ driving force
Confronted with a tirade of continuous dissent.
All are born with colored eyes
With colored love and a colored mind.
with the ongoing struggle to demystify
with a challenge to revive
a sonnet called life.
Curio-Cities by Dilpreeta Vasudeva 