EXPLORING A CITY?
GET OVER YOUR FEAR OF TRAFFIC!
I have been travelling around Mumbai since I was kid. Different situations, with my parents, without them. Different parts of the city for different reasons obviously. Sometimes for a meal (lunch, dinner, etc.), to meet someone, for work, meetings etc.
Traffic in Mumbai has always been a nightmare. New roads get built just so that traffic can exist. That is not my opinion. Drive around Mumbai and you will realise that it is an established fact. However it is not new. It didn’t happen yesterday. No one is surprised by traffic or even expects driving or commuting to be easy.
Despite this problem having always existed, there now seems to be a growing fear of traffic. Honestly, it’s almost a mortal fear. And the way I see it, there are many culprits to this, the most obvious ones being of course people! Commuters are becoming more and more impatient. I have seen people go crazy and start yelling because a traffic light lasted a little over 120 seconds.
Having said so, there is one undeniable culprit. The mother of all culprits! It’s called Google Maps.
Before Google Maps came into existence, traffic was just traffic. It was just this annoying thing that you got caught in but assumed it to be a part of life. Now it is thought of as this monster that has to be researched to death and beyond death. Who knows? Maybe there is a best route for traffic there as well.
Everyday before leaving the house, people, at least in my house, sit on the couch and punch at their phones. Then ensues the extremely fascinating discussion of routes and how they won’t reach where they want to go on time because there is traffic everywhere and there are so many red marks.
I mean, of course you are going to be late. You are still sitting on that couch in your living room. Maybe if you stopped speculating and got off the couch, you may actually get somewhere.
When I was a kid, my Mom used to go to work at 8 AM and sometimes she would come home at 8pm or 8 30pm. A lot of the time it was because of traffic and it was never looked upon as a big deal. “Yeah today there was traffic, maybe tomorrow there won’t be, hopefully” was the general attitude. Either way work, lunch, whatever people had committed to was something that people just went to and did.
Now more often than not, plans will be cancelled at the very last possible moment because people opened their phones and found traffic. People will say strange things like, “ I am too tired to sit in traffic”. Lets just meet another day. Lets just have the meeting over the phone: chat, call, Facetime”. Everyone seems really content just working out of home and not interacting with anything other than his or her computer.
Let’s not even get started on the people who make an informed decision about living out of the city (Panvel, Goregaon, Borivali) and then act like there is some kind of force field around either Navi Mumbai / Andheri ( depending on where they live). One has to have a conference to convince them of the simplest plans because they saw Google Maps and it told them it would “take too long” and their “ETA” is just not doable. First of all, you wonder if they didn’t think this through when they were choosing where to live because obviously what they are saving on rent, they are spending on transport but while adding the Google Maps whining they do in. What was the thinking? To trap themselves at home? and watch Google Maps with morbid fascination while feeling FOMO?
Guys, at this point your fear isn’t even of real traffic. Since you don’t know the extent of it or really anything about it. You just see a red mark on a simulated map and decide that you are too tired to sit in traffic. And I’m sorry; I really must be mistaken because I just heard you say that you were too “ tired” to “sit”.
As Aziz Ansari put it “ Did you recently purchase a Flintstones type vehicle where you have to run along? I don’t think so!!”