Have you seen this ad on YouTube featuring a seriously overweight guy who professes to love traffic? If you haven't, you're not missing an awful lot. If you have, well, good on you! Either way, what I mean to say is that in a strange way, pretty much all of us Indians are like the overweight guy, we just love traffic for rather different reasons than the chap in the ad.
If you've spent any length of time in the company of Indian males, you will probably have discussed <insert your locality here>'s traffic problems. Everyone, no doubt, would have spoken of the traffic with contempt. There were probably a few mentions in the conversation of how the traffic is bad because there was no planning to how your city/town/subdivision of Atlantis was constructed. Someone will also probably refer to a few bottlenecks. At some point, everyone would have begun to blame it on the government and the conversation would have turned into a denouncement of all things bureaucratic.
I bring this up to point out that we Indians, no matter what we may claim in our living rooms, love traffic as a source of conversation. I'm not just talking about the one you have with your friends - though I'm sure each and every one of the 1.5 billion people in this country have had that one. I've also discussed traffic with auto drivers, cabbies and random people who I happened to be sitting next to.
Traffic is to adults what Justin Bieber is to non-American-female teenagers - everybody hates it, but they can't stop discussing it. It's like that uncle in the family that no one likes but everyone has at least 50 stories about.
In all this I bear no grudge against traffic or those who discuss it. I simply ask that the next time you find yourself running short of things to talk about, don't repeat that old conversation about how it's impossible to get from one end of Majestic to the other in under a year. Instead, do something useful, like walking your dog or your cat (do people even walk their cats???) or doing the crossword or making fun of Donald Trump or something.
If you've spent any length of time in the company of Indian males, you will probably have discussed <insert your locality here>'s traffic problems. Everyone, no doubt, would have spoken of the traffic with contempt. There were probably a few mentions in the conversation of how the traffic is bad because there was no planning to how your city/town/subdivision of Atlantis was constructed. Someone will also probably refer to a few bottlenecks. At some point, everyone would have begun to blame it on the government and the conversation would have turned into a denouncement of all things bureaucratic.
I bring this up to point out that we Indians, no matter what we may claim in our living rooms, love traffic as a source of conversation. I'm not just talking about the one you have with your friends - though I'm sure each and every one of the 1.5 billion people in this country have had that one. I've also discussed traffic with auto drivers, cabbies and random people who I happened to be sitting next to.
Traffic is to adults what Justin Bieber is to non-American-female teenagers - everybody hates it, but they can't stop discussing it. It's like that uncle in the family that no one likes but everyone has at least 50 stories about.
In all this I bear no grudge against traffic or those who discuss it. I simply ask that the next time you find yourself running short of things to talk about, don't repeat that old conversation about how it's impossible to get from one end of Majestic to the other in under a year. Instead, do something useful, like walking your dog or your cat (do people even walk their cats???) or doing the crossword or making fun of Donald Trump or something.
Making fun of Donald Trump XD
ReplyDeleteIt's funny because it's true...
One does not simply not make fun of Donald Trump.
Delete