Streetwise Survival (Swaroop Agaskar)

Coming to Pune, you could almost start believing that life is a mammoth conspiracy against foreigners. The visitor needs a survival kit to be able to handle the city and much more the life in the streets. Not to worry though, God helps people in trouble-they say. (Well, He pretty well should, because in this city people don’t.)

If you are looking for public transport, which halts where you want to get on or off, take a bus. You just can’t miss the red PMC monster, (miss the sighting. I mean no guarantees for the bus), since the only part of the bus which doesn’t make a noise is the horn. The trouble here is that you have to wait for the one that does halt. Even if in other cities, sufficiency of money can take care of everything, here the corresponding necessity is patience – lots of it, at that. Rickshaws seldom oblige. In the first place you don’t find any, if you do he is probably having his lunch break or has his meter tied up in protest of the killing of a fellow driver, a month ago.

But taking the bus has it’s own risks, do so only if you have a good fighting arm, complete confidence in your toe hold and a healthy scorn for the laws of gravity, for this over loaded monstrosity has a habit of tilting to angles of 45 degrees. If you don’t possess this qualities-WALK.

If you are a pedestrian (and you don’t have much choice in this matter as finding transport can be next to impossible.) remember your place is on the carriageway, since pavements are meant for hawkers. Start limbering up for the urban Olympics: high jumping over the debris, long jumping over pot holes hurdling over lying humans-try not to breathe.

Crossing streets can be a cakewalk. Just stroll to the other side at any point except the zebra crossing, holding one hand a loft to stop the on coming cars. Only two things can occur, either the cars will come to a dead halt or you will. But here the odds are in your favour thanks to the axle breaking conditions of the road. As the officials of P.M.C., committed to the people, say: the roads are deliberately "Maintained” in this state so that cars don’t speed and so slow speed doesn’t kill.

Being a driver in pune calls for a specials set of skills. The first is to stay out of the way of the buses, the vendors and pedestrians. Second, the potholes (these are responsible for disappearance of vehicles in numbers which exceed that of ships and airplanes lost in the Bermuda triangle). And the third, the white and blue clad policeman manning the intersections and giving contrary directions. A complete disregard for the traffic lights is a basic necessity.

If you are caught in a massive pile up and there is no policeman or traffic signal to blame, the cause is a procession or a morcha . And then as you wait in the endless pune traffic jam think not of time as wasted, but as an opportunity to have a glimpse of eternity.

Despite all this, if you can survive on the streets of pune, they say you can survive anywhere.
But, chances are, you wouldn’t want to.

(swaroop@agaskars.com)