This being compensation season, I had to get to work today despite the fact that today was a holiday!!

I gave the gym a miss, piling on the excuse that I’m not at my fittest best today. I left home a little beyond my standard time and was bracing myself up for the hour and a half ride to work.

As I passed the by-lanes to get to the main streets, I was greeted to lesser than usual traffic. WOW! What a pleasure it is to drive on days like this. Turning on my music, I started cruising, enjoying the great Bangalore weather and the pirated MP3.

There was a sense of nostalgia.

The not-so-crowded roads took me back to my teen days, when my cousin and I could go from one corner of the city to another, in pretty much no time. Bangalore used to be a blissful place to drive around – cool all through the year, disciplined drivers, an odd honk here or there and a lot of green.

How I wish this could last forever!!!  I went to the extent of proposing legislations that make governments declare two days a month as days when people have to stay home and I could get to work enjoying my drive, maybe IT organizations need to have everyone work from home and that can take the traffic away and then this screechy sound of metal touching metal!

A big blue BTS bus just went past touching my car, just enough to cause a blue scratch mark from the boot to the two doors! The damage in Bangalore terms, 3rd degree – something that is not carnage enough to cost you a bomb, but something that can cause a bit of carnage to the heart! The guy didn’t bother to stop – he just kept going on and on. I was game for a fight and said, let me chase him down and started racing! Within moments, I gave up. Not because my car didn’t have the vroom or the guy I was going to pick up an argument against was too powerful – I’ve seen many such non value adding fights on the streets before – they are a waste of your energy and poke a little hole to your pocket as the bus driver is not going to pay you any money!

I pulled up to the sides to look at my most recent addition, the big blue scratch in addition to the other dozens of scratch marks & dents that adorn the body of my car. I’m not alone here and I see this on every other car – The brand new Civics, the Audis that recently hit the road and the good old 800s – they are all there to give me company! I’m on that ever growing list of people who believe that these minor things are best left unattended to!

Five years ago, I’d bought a brand new Zen. The car had a few “medals” and I was off to the showroom in a hurry to fix this. I spent a good 8K change and got the car to the office – the car looked like mint and I walked up feeling good. In less than 5 minutes, a security guard called me at my desk to say that a stray dog entered the office car park and damaged a car – it just lifted its legs and scratched my car bumpers; thankfully, it couldn’t get higher. I came down running to check my damages and a migration manager who came along was laughing out loud, feeling sorry for me within (as he claims). So much for getting my car fixed. I’ve sworn since, never to fix these minor issues.

Back to today, I was wondering if I did something wrong. Like every other driver, I can swear and say that I was the best and never put a foot wrong. I continued driving to work and while driving, it dawned upon me that maybe the “extra space” was what caused the incident. There are days when I can drive in bumper to bumper traffic and still get home without anyone touching the car, but it’s the suddenly freely available extra space that make drivers lose control. Look at what driving in bumper to bumper traffic means to us!

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