Blueline Menace and the road sense of Delhi

If you stay in Delhi then you knew all about Bluelines and the menace they were much before the spate of accidents last week when suddenly the entire country came to know of them. Infamy has great speed. And with the Govt standing up and as usual trying to fix things ham handedly the commuting for the avg Joe has become tougher. But it is best not to trust the Govt as last time there was a similar crisis the Govt had the brain wave, they painted all the buses Blue from the existing Red and called them Blueline instead of Redline. And the tack was ' See now we have banned Redlines'. Reminded me of Yes Minister.


Nowadays every day the newspapers are full of news of how Bluelines drive rashly and how they dont obey the traffic rules etc and it seems as if just by removing these buses heaven will descend on the Delhi roads. I have some strong views on the same.
Blaming the Blueline buses and their drivers is fine if we can hold a hand on our heart and say that we all obey traffic rules.

Since the Blueline and truck drivers are damned anyway lets come down by weight category.

Large Cars and SUV weight class : Callcentre drivers over speed, young turks on the wheel zoom with blaring music to impress their non existing girlfriends. Any body who has been to West Delhi would have heard the 'dhinchak dhinchak' music from tinted glass windows roaming around the market place and parking slam bang in the middle to have 'Chickan lags' from holes in the middle of the shopping blocks called chicken corners. Do they stop at red lights? No sir, they are for lesser mortals.
Heaven forbid if you stop and allow a pedastrian to pass, they will ensure that their horn makes a hole in your ear drum.

Two Wheeler Class : They never overtake from the right side, they are all related to Valentino Rossi and nowadays the latest I see is that the guys carry their helmets, but they are generally on the shoulder instead of the head. Talk of not knowing where the imp part of their body is. Thank god they dont put it way below thinking 'that head' needs to be protected more.

Cyclists and Pedestrians: Stats say that maximum deaths are of this class. But what do you do when you see cyclists coming down busy roads on the wrong side believing that they are made of gods armour and nothing can happen to them. Pedestrians cross busy roads in traffic just believing in destiny that their time has not come yet. I was once waiting for someone in connought place and I saw this person weaving in and out of fast flowing traffic as if he was a combination of Jet Li and Chow Yun Fat. A car would come towrds him and he would sway back to allow it to go from an inch in front. A bus would come and he would take this tiny step to be within handshaking distance of the driver. Anywhere else but India this would have been in AXN most dangerous Videos but here it is part of life and growing up.

I would like to end with all those who believe Seat belts ruin their look and clothes and so dispense with them. May their tribe diminish so that if god forbid something happened

Tell me honestly how many of us fall in these above categories. Point i am trying to make is simple, till the time we all dont drive responsibly nothing is going to change. The Blueline or the call centre cab guys are uneducated etc but when will all of us, the so called 'educated' guys learn road sense.

Radio ads

When Times FM was launched some 11 years back it was the rebirth of the radio as a happening medium. Till then Radio to people of my age was all about vividh bharati in the mornings with its corny ads and cornier sponsored programs. Phatte kamania ads and Modi continental programs were the order of the day not to forget Simco hair fixer for the hirsute. The trendier guys like us listened to Yuvavani and the late night English music programs like Forces request and Date with you. Those were the time when being gay was being happy.
Times FM changed all that and I was lucky to be part of that revolution. Trendy stereophonic music and peppy RJ's made the station rock. We were a group of people who were selling radio spots and were very conscious of ensuring that the quality of the ads were good. We had people like Roshan Abbas, Shamshir Luthra, Sameep Nanda and Gaurav Kapoor as the voices to ensure that the ads were 'cool'.
In between all these guys and their modulated deep voices we used to do some quick and dirty ones too. Mainly these were for the retail clients ( 'Bongerie') and the inhouse ads. I remember one time distinctly where Mr Akash Verma and your truly were asked to create a quick and dirty radio spot about some new supplement which targeted the Saadi Dilli types. And we created one spot which was true to the tradition of Phatte kamania of Vividh bharati. It was so bad that we all loved it. In that we created this punju character called Teetu. And for some weird reason Mr Ajay Arora ( a true blue son of saadi dilli and punju to the core ) got christened as Teetu. Till date ole Times FM hands will call him 'Teetu' or 'kinky'. Now you know of Teetu someday I will tell the Kinky story too.
With Radio Mirchi and One and fever and HITZ there are channels galore now but the ads are still the same. In between of course there are some real gems but mostly they are crap. I mean having a deep/sweet voice saying 'Haridwar mein Baba Ramdev ashram ke paas.. is not exactly great creative. But I guess it has recall value.
The ones I really like nowadays are the current Cadbury ads ( shero shairi ) and the Maruti Swift ad ( take off on Saadi Dilli teh ode punjus). More on Dilli and its Punjus later.

Going back to the roots

Last week I went to Malda, this is a small town in North Bengal, famous for mangoes and ABA Ghani Khan Choudhury. The former still as sweet and fresh as my childhood and the latter dead and gone.
It was my grandmothers death anniversery and all relatives were gathering to remember one of the liveliest woman that any one of us had known. Sharp tongued and witty she was known as 'pishima' to all in that small town. Till some years back you could get off at the station and just tell the ricksaw puller ' pishimas bari' and be sure to be taken to her house.
I went after 14 years to the place where for the first 12 years of my life I had spent 2 months every year. As usual there were bitter sweet memories and people who you had played with in childhood were these different adults with their own problems and challenges.
Call me a hopeless romantic but there is something different about the air and smell of Bengal, specially in the monsoon. And the lilting language adds to the charm. In the 2 days that I was there I tried to rewalk all the memory lanes starting with getting up early ( 5.30 am is early for me !), going to the local haat with my uncle, see him haggle with the fishmongers over Rs 2 - Rs 5 and go in the evening to the river side to be bitten by mosquitoes the size of sparrows.
The first thing that struck me was that everything seemed smaller, the roads, the shops, the house and the rooms. The ground on which I had played so much of football seemed liliputian.
The second thing was the number of medicine shops. I am sure there are more medicine shops per sq Km in Malda than anywhere else in the rest of the world.
The 2 days there also showed me how simplicity and large heartedness is still there in these small towns and how the simple things of life can give so much of pleasure. I also saw how big city living can add cunning to the smallest of kids who can then play to the gallery.
All in all an interesting trip.