Friday, April 07, 2006

Mass exodus from Bangalore

No, this is not about the IT-BT industry relocating to Chennai and Hyderabad. (I am not worried about that anymore).

Most people living in Bangalore, including Kannadigas, are not natural Bangaloreans. So whenever there is a long weekend, a very large number of people take off from the city to visit their hometowns. This happened again last week, when people took off for a 4-day weekend for Ugadi. I was one of them, trying to get onto a bus on 29th night. When my auto eventually approached the bus stand (Majestic), I noticed that traffic had piled up for at least 2 kilometres from the bus stand. I have no idea how any of the vehicles on K.G Road reached the bus stand that day. My auto driver passed through all the narrowest roads around the main road, some of the roads so narrow people fear to attempt them on two-wheelers, and eventually reached the bus stand. Once in, I noticed that KSRTC had introduced a large number of extra buses for this day, so they had piled up all inside the bus stand and all roads surrounding it. They were running a bus EVERY SINGLE MINUTE from 11PM till 11:30PM to Shimoga alone! Of course, once our bus made it's way out of the bus stand (one hour late), it got stuck in a huge traffic pile up on Tumkur road created by numerous vehicles going out of the city. It really looked like people were fleeing a disaster-hit city.

This problem will only get worse as days go by. I plan to take an extra day off in such cases and go out of the city one daysooner from now on.

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