Traffic Jams: Differing Experiences


Now that schools have opened after the summer holidays, traffic in Bangalore got a lot worse. Hard it may be to believe, but yes, there’s always room in Bangalore for traffic to get worse. It’s the usual set of reasons: parents changing their departure time to align with the bus time, others dropping their kids at school on the way to work, the roads near every school getting jammed by school buses…

For the very junior classes, many schools start off by having very short days initially to let them acclimatize gradually. As a result, one of my friends complained that he’d dropped his daughter at 9:15, caught the bus to work, and found that by the time he reached office at 11:30, his kid was back home. Her (school) day was over before our guy had even reached office!

In the evening, I told my daughter that kids, including her, were adding to the traffic jams and commute time. Never one to back off from a round of verbal jousting, she immediately asked what I was complaining about. She too had been stuck in traffic, she said, and had reached school so late that she’d missed the much hated assembly, the boring “lecture” by the principal during the assembly, and even the first period. “And thus, unlike the other kids in class, my first period was the PE (games) period”, she said happily.

Oh boy, so she associates traffic jams with missing classes, I thought. Yet another perk of being a kid: if you miss a class, no harm done. Unlike at office, where the work is still there waiting for you regardless of how long your commute took (sigh)… Enjoy it while it lasts, munchkin.

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