Delhi was really going crazy today. The blast-wave of crazy likely started from my core and rippled through. I had a long day out. The longer I stayed out there, the more the chaos in psyche and city seemed to bloom. In the end it was like a video game - interactions in real world to the level of feeling artificial is not a good indicator. But despite the dehumanizing experience I did reach home feeling humanized because of the traffic. Everybody out to rush to their nest. Much like me, who zipped through it in what can be imagined as a pheasant through the lantana bushes.
First the start... there was none. I was up 0800 (regrettably late), trying like a fish to get some air. Or start on my startup work. A lot of promise holds. Regrettably, sleep held a greater promise. It talked me into sleeping with it right when I thought me and code would be bedfellows. I should stop getting into a flight response of retiring into the bed with laptop at any enervating event; they come too many too often. It could mean I'm slow, or am slowing down. That, too, happens with age, but having red of crazier people in further stretches, I'm sure laggardness or memory fatigue can be left as a pipe (un)dream and I'm left to my devices.
Then I left for Noida.
4 events put me off track
1. Venue of work was switched to SSD's.
2. My roomie had emptied my wallet this morning
3. The petrol guy over-filled
4. My blossoming schizophrenia
Disorientation started right from the moment of exit. The market road was blocked by somebody or something alien to Delhi's markets. I was stuck barely 100m from home. The recent introduction of divider barriers to LJN, is a degrading dehumanizing and downright hazardous activity. I used to lament about the pedestrians when there as one, and yesterday found myself lamenting about (and because of) vehicle owners who get to face the linear logic of these civic space planners, who ensured that LJN could be brought to a halt by a novice out with an SUV. Good that I had a motorbike, and a narrow channel through the rickshawallah and autowallahs, leading into the last of exit lanes to slip into, to escape through the bylanes and circle around the traffic jam that by then probably extended all the way to my place as I drove away from the scene of inefficiency.
I'm surprised how far they can take a bad concept, like the way they've done this market. {Shudders at the thought of medical emergencies and fire evacuation}
Not soon as I'd escaped a scene that pushed me towards intent of mass strikes, did I find myself building an intent of murder. There you go, human experience percolating from a collective to an individual level... guess that counts for something. People can't act on simple instructions. The petrol guy overfilled, and since I was, financially, running on zero-contingency calculations expecting a simple experience, this was one I didn't anticipate, and one which set my day wrong. In good nature I did compensate for his overfill. In the process I forgot about the freeway toll that the last precious INR10 note was supposed to be for!
That was realized shortly before entering the toll. Perspiration set in. I stopped shortly after Ashram. Somebody misinformed there was an ATM machine a short distance ahead. Ahead I went, relieved, and it enervating that there wasn't one. I could imagine this being the only spot in Delhi which would need about 4-km of detour to get to an ATM. FML. Tapri-wallahs were amused seeing my situation. My iPod music had to be put aside, and my sound trip ended there. Work went off my head, trying to calculate the extra half hour it'd take to wind my alternate way through Akshardham. I cursed my boss a bit for shifting the venue today in exasperation, too.
After going nuts, I realized that I wasn't in a mess. I had money in my bag, in fact, all over it. There is a me that has learnt to anticipate whirring fans and an associated phenomenon. That me would not let an object like a bag be deadweight in times of emergency. Hence, I traced down a 100 Rs note compacted into a ID pocket. What schizophrenic, I told myself. One panics the other works a way out. A third one blogs.
It took a while to reach SSD's but finally made it. My instincts to lampoon the lazy employed kinda took over at the gates to SSD's apartment complex, but I eschewed lengthy conversations and overcame the rest with the motion of my feet.
On the way back, Delhi was at its craziest. Right from the freeway, I ran into thick traffic. That made the freeway ride a lot fun, and fast (faster than i'd go in thinner traffic, maybe), but I approached a wall of traffic to the end of it. Long way round seemed the way out of it quicker, and I took a 3km detour to take the Barapullah - an epic elevated-road-next-door that is free of people and traffic (traffic = vehicles, in a collective, in a small space). That sat fine with expectations. But getting there was real fun, slicing between the traffic. I can be a good impulsive driver, and made some quick-but-sneaky-not-amounting-to-rash decisions to do the slicing.
To know what short-lived pleasures are, the Barapullah is a sure shot experience. For soon as I descended down from that elevated corridor onto the arterial Lala Lajpat Road, the wall of traffic greeted me again, to dismay. I thought I'd get a clean way in. The drizzle had also picked in the meantime. So the clean way turned out to be messy by the end. I took the Birbal Rd to slug my way through the Jangpura traffic. People with similar ideas as mine but vehicles 5 times bigger blocked this exit too. The road devolved into mud floor, but that was overcome, too.
Last challenge for the day came in the way of a railway line. Yes, there is one right in the 'hood. It has no commercial traffic playing, but just load wagons ferrying to and fro through the day. There is a barrier that I've always found closed. Where there's no way around, there's a way under. Hence ensued a careful process of jumping the closed barrier by going under it (the irony). In drizzle and over a stretch littered with water-filled potholes. It went fine. Fey was not bruised a bit, and I improvised over the second barrier. Finally got home.
First the start... there was none. I was up 0800 (regrettably late), trying like a fish to get some air. Or start on my startup work. A lot of promise holds. Regrettably, sleep held a greater promise. It talked me into sleeping with it right when I thought me and code would be bedfellows. I should stop getting into a flight response of retiring into the bed with laptop at any enervating event; they come too many too often. It could mean I'm slow, or am slowing down. That, too, happens with age, but having red of crazier people in further stretches, I'm sure laggardness or memory fatigue can be left as a pipe (un)dream and I'm left to my devices.
Then I left for Noida.
4 events put me off track
1. Venue of work was switched to SSD's.
2. My roomie had emptied my wallet this morning
3. The petrol guy over-filled
4. My blossoming schizophrenia
Disorientation started right from the moment of exit. The market road was blocked by somebody or something alien to Delhi's markets. I was stuck barely 100m from home. The recent introduction of divider barriers to LJN, is a degrading dehumanizing and downright hazardous activity. I used to lament about the pedestrians when there as one, and yesterday found myself lamenting about (and because of) vehicle owners who get to face the linear logic of these civic space planners, who ensured that LJN could be brought to a halt by a novice out with an SUV. Good that I had a motorbike, and a narrow channel through the rickshawallah and autowallahs, leading into the last of exit lanes to slip into, to escape through the bylanes and circle around the traffic jam that by then probably extended all the way to my place as I drove away from the scene of inefficiency.
I'm surprised how far they can take a bad concept, like the way they've done this market. {Shudders at the thought of medical emergencies and fire evacuation}
Not soon as I'd escaped a scene that pushed me towards intent of mass strikes, did I find myself building an intent of murder. There you go, human experience percolating from a collective to an individual level... guess that counts for something. People can't act on simple instructions. The petrol guy overfilled, and since I was, financially, running on zero-contingency calculations expecting a simple experience, this was one I didn't anticipate, and one which set my day wrong. In good nature I did compensate for his overfill. In the process I forgot about the freeway toll that the last precious INR10 note was supposed to be for!
That was realized shortly before entering the toll. Perspiration set in. I stopped shortly after Ashram. Somebody misinformed there was an ATM machine a short distance ahead. Ahead I went, relieved, and it enervating that there wasn't one. I could imagine this being the only spot in Delhi which would need about 4-km of detour to get to an ATM. FML. Tapri-wallahs were amused seeing my situation. My iPod music had to be put aside, and my sound trip ended there. Work went off my head, trying to calculate the extra half hour it'd take to wind my alternate way through Akshardham. I cursed my boss a bit for shifting the venue today in exasperation, too.
After going nuts, I realized that I wasn't in a mess. I had money in my bag, in fact, all over it. There is a me that has learnt to anticipate whirring fans and an associated phenomenon. That me would not let an object like a bag be deadweight in times of emergency. Hence, I traced down a 100 Rs note compacted into a ID pocket. What schizophrenic, I told myself. One panics the other works a way out. A third one blogs.
It took a while to reach SSD's but finally made it. My instincts to lampoon the lazy employed kinda took over at the gates to SSD's apartment complex, but I eschewed lengthy conversations and overcame the rest with the motion of my feet.
On the way back, Delhi was at its craziest. Right from the freeway, I ran into thick traffic. That made the freeway ride a lot fun, and fast (faster than i'd go in thinner traffic, maybe), but I approached a wall of traffic to the end of it. Long way round seemed the way out of it quicker, and I took a 3km detour to take the Barapullah - an epic elevated-road-next-door that is free of people and traffic (traffic = vehicles, in a collective, in a small space). That sat fine with expectations. But getting there was real fun, slicing between the traffic. I can be a good impulsive driver, and made some quick-but-sneaky-not-amounting-to-rash decisions to do the slicing.
To know what short-lived pleasures are, the Barapullah is a sure shot experience. For soon as I descended down from that elevated corridor onto the arterial Lala Lajpat Road, the wall of traffic greeted me again, to dismay. I thought I'd get a clean way in. The drizzle had also picked in the meantime. So the clean way turned out to be messy by the end. I took the Birbal Rd to slug my way through the Jangpura traffic. People with similar ideas as mine but vehicles 5 times bigger blocked this exit too. The road devolved into mud floor, but that was overcome, too.
Last challenge for the day came in the way of a railway line. Yes, there is one right in the 'hood. It has no commercial traffic playing, but just load wagons ferrying to and fro through the day. There is a barrier that I've always found closed. Where there's no way around, there's a way under. Hence ensued a careful process of jumping the closed barrier by going under it (the irony). In drizzle and over a stretch littered with water-filled potholes. It went fine. Fey was not bruised a bit, and I improvised over the second barrier. Finally got home.
Widget by Css Reflex | TutZone
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment