Ajith Nair

There are some examples that I have seen recently that tell me that the journey towards a service oriented economy is not mere lip service. Let me start with what is or rather was the biggest point of pain in my life, the Internet connection, rather the lack of it most times. Like most white collar Indians, the predilection for anything multi national is a given. So I preferred Hathway over Tata Indicom, Satyam or even the sloth MTNL. Let me summarise my experience succinctly, Hathway delighted me on only one count, shutting up when I asked them to, over an inebriated, frustrated phone conversation. Repeated line drops, non collection of payment cheques (also implying no payment avenues except home collection of cheques), adhoc disconnections, adhoc disconnections (the former meaning purposive, the latter meaning vagaries of the connectivity). So I had a black cable emerging like an umbilical cord from my laptop but then the baby was long dead. With a heavy heart and an unjustly light ...

The BEST has introduced a SMART card. The first part is fiction, the second part is plastic. For 1200 bucks a month, the BEST lets you get onto any bus anywhere, any time. Now if they came up with movie tickets like that I know that there would be takers. Nonetheless, the economists of the BEST who also double up as conductors seem to have seen something that most consumers haven’t. Hence the only people who have bought the cards are these people and their kith and kin. At a more serious level, 1200 or even the 800 bucks a month option is simply a big loser to the other 12 rake mammoth that easily picks up 5000 people at a time and deposits them the other side of town in half the time. So what if you get badly crushed and start smelling like sardines….the BEST is not aroma-therapeutic either. And on bad days you could end up having two meals on the bus if not three, given traffic and more traffic. The card is hardly SMART. The conductor has a contraption which still needs to do a steth...

Mumbai is a vertical city. It reaches the heights of intolerance, impatience, gonnda-giri, bonhomie, floods and every possible event that you might imagine. To such a city of extremes, the presence of the double decker on its roads is a fitting tribute. The double decker represents an extreme of bus travel- both good and bad depending on the nature of the experience that you’ve had. My first sight of a double decker was that of the long necked one, which looked a bit like a crane lying flat on its belly. The driver was well cut off from the rest of the bus and seemed to enjoy supreme powers. Those didn’t last long I presume. The versions that are currently on draw the driver close in and hold the whole package tight. The driver is still cut off from the passenger compartment by a grill that makes one feel like prisoners sometimes. The joy of the double decker is obviously at the top. The bottom layer can almost be treated as a must have for holding the top up that’s all. The exhilarati...

I have always looked at this with a mix of awe, marvel and sheer abhorrence. There is something about the guy behind the wheel that is worth marveling about and let me tell you why. Most roads in Mumbai are after thoughts. They were wrestled out of what remained after everyone had grabbed their piece of the land action. In such after thoughts where fresh air is at a premium and parallel lines coincide, getting a full blown BEST bus to even move to move is an art, to say the least. It takes immense patience when every possible animal, man, woman and child would want to cross the road before the bus passes them by. Then there is the ubiquitous rick wallah whose ability to move 360 in the same spot is a gift from the powers that be. Last but not the least there is the hawker whose prime objective in life seems to be to take as much of the main street to himself. Now for the abhorrence bit. A secret not yet revealed part of the BEST training to its drivers in about how to intimidate everyo...

The BEST has put up signboards at every bus stop which say ‘for the Handicap to board n alight’. These signboards have been there for the last couple of months. The design says that BEST buses will stop right next to those signboards so that it becomes easy for the handicapped. Trust BEST guys to have a heart. Full grown young men like me, have problems sometimes getting into BEST buses simply put because the driver decides that this stop doesn’t look worth stopping at. Hardly the ‘best’ people to provide special service to the handicapped. Is there any science that goes into designing seats for the handicapped? Those of you who have taken the BEST will realize what I am trying to get at. The only positive that I see about the seats reserved for the handicapped is that it’s right next to the exit. That’s all. Let me try and list the downsides 1. The size of the single seat right upfront is the pits. Its can accommodate kids but not full grown adults 2. Any adult sitting in that seat wi...

BEST buses have their own way of creating parity. They have seats reserved up front for the ladies, senior citizens and the handicapped. Off late these have been imposed with some force and seem to be serving their rightful purpose. Today I witnessed the downside of this. A middle aged couple were occupying a ‘ladies’ seat and soon the man had to give it up for another woman. He wasn’t amused and started blaming his wife for having drawn him from another ‘neutral’ seat into sitting there. The wife, not one to give up, argued loud and clear about how it wasn’t her insistence and how he always had a choice. Suddenly the phrase dirty linen in public was being enacted much to the amusement of all and sundry. The man, now a mixture of embarrassment and anger explained to everyone at large and no one in particular that how he was actually questioning only the “principle” of it all. For non Indians- this is usually what an Indian man does when he wants to blame his wife but doesn’t have the b...

Warning: I’m comatose so anything that I write might just be the blatant truth. It took me two hours to get back home from work. It’s a distance of about 10- 15km I guess. The first three km took an hour. After that, I stopped looking at my watch and started staring at the line of fate on my palm instead. Surely there must be a positive side to this. For company on the BEST bus I have work weary, dreary eyed passengers who look like they’re headed for a Nazi concentration camp and they know it. The guy sitting next to me might have been dead for all you know; his expression hasn’t changed in the last half an hour. Much like the traffic situation. I try to entertain myself by reading all possible billboards, notices, shop signs, discount offers. In five minutes I have memorized everything in my line of sight. As if on cue, the bus inches and lo behold, I have added something to the scenery from my window. It happens to be the rear end of a truck which is green in color. Green color truc...