This post is about a daily mundane activity-driving to office every morning. I love driving and consider it as a fun activity. But, traffic/ road conditions in kolkata can make you feel otherwise.
There are multiple routes to our office. We often drive through the same route everyday. So, the route, traffic signals, zebra crossings got quite familiar in a few weeks. Although, kolkata roads are quite crowded with vehicles, but the traffic system is quite efficient.
Soon after the introduction of biometric attendance system in our office, we decided to reach office within a particular time frame. Since then, my mind had adapted a clock all by itself counting every minute required to travel to office. It constantly runs in the background. Thereafter, i started following the traffic signal pattern, signal durations and positions to place my vehicle at zebra crossings for easy manoeuvring of the car in less time.
I will give you all an example here. The first traffic signal just after i come to road from my home is important here. If we get it green, the next two signals will be green by the time we reach there. And, if we slightly hurry for the fourth signal, we get it green as well. But there is a catch. Here we have to take a right and the right signal stays green just for about 15 seconds. It is here that we are almost always stuck. The total red signal length is around 60 seconds.
After this we enter through a narrow stretch of road which passes through a slum area for around 200 metres. Here people use the side of the road and socialise with their neighbours; children making merry jumping and playing; cycles/ scooters parked on both side of road in an inclined way. Its like their common sitting area where they do all sorts of domestic activities right from brushing teeth, gossiping over tea. As normal and fun as it may sound, it is a horror story for drivers/riders.
Since it is office goers time, we do see a lot of unknown familiar faces, cars with familiar license plates, traffic policemen doing the same gesture from the same position in the same manner everyday. Sometimes , we even have eye contact as if we hypothetically nod to each other. Its actually fun. We also meet some of our colleagues on the way in signals and greet them with hand gestures.
The average time taken to reach office on normal traffic days is around 20 minutes. If we ever miss the first green signal described above, we fall into a loop of red signals and get late by around 6 minutes. There are some schools on the way. If they have exams/ PTM, it gets crowded that sets our time haywire. Although, its the same route everyday, but the experience is always new.
This post is part of #BlogchatterA2Z challenge and this is the Z– post
