It was a cloudy Saturday morning. We planned to go out to Brigade Road and Church Street. So we were to find out which bus would take us there... Few years back i had to depend on the information from other passengers at the bus stop or from the neighbors or by asking my friends around.....
But Bangalore has changed... It has changed for the good... With the broadband internet connection, i just typed in the url of the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation... and OOO La La... all the information were at our fingertips....
So we stepped out of our home and started going towards the bus stop. It started drizzling. We rode the bus... if somebody is thinking its the old jharjhariya tin-made bus.. he will be wrong.. its a brand new air conditioned Volvo bus...And it was of course not over crowded...We took the seat in the front row...With the FM radio channel music soothing our ears inside the bus, we started our journey...
We entered a bank... It had a completely different look than a bank of yesteryears... With a laptop in front of her, a highly sophisticated, English speaking lady greeted us... And i thought is there really any difference between a bank of Singapore or a bank of Japan and this bank in India?
After we came out of that institution, there was a three wheeler... While riding on that small vehicle i was wondering how over the years Bangalore has become the melting pot of old and modern lifestyles...a volvo bus and a three wheeler co-exist here without any friction...
When i see a lady painting Rangolli in front of her home in the morning...going to office in formal in the afternoon and solving Sudoku in the evening... it just strengthens my view that Bangalore has become a potpourri of old and new values...
When i see people from one corner of India coming out of sleek modern car and ordering a tender coconut from a roadside vendor who may be from another part of India and both probably having different mother-tongues, i start thinking that this is probably the demographic dividend which has made us unique...probably India is the only country where we can see such a confluence of people in the market place... probably this is the place where people from every stratum of the society come out in such an afternoon to flow in the river of life...
After spending few hours at a second hand book stall we felt hungry... Here also there were plenty of options... from a sophisticated restaurant to a roadside dhaba...we preferred the second one because of its authenticity... We ordered Masalla dosa, Rawa idly and butter milk...
There is a huge difference between the foods that are available in different corners of India.. in Bangalore if its Dosa and idly-Bada...in Mumbai it ought to be BadaPpaow... in Kolkata it may be Fish Curry-Rice...and in Delhi it could have been Rajma-chaul...
After our lunch, we took another airconditioned bus back to our home.. When that bus was speeding up on the decongested Air-port road... i strongly felt that Bangalore has changed in front of our eyes... And it has changed for the good....
Note: It would have been nice to see BMTC procuring a software which would let a passenger enter the two end points of his journey and give the possible combination of buses to do that. i have seen these kinds of software are heavily used in Japan. Please give it a thought...
