Yesterday I had to go to Nehru Place to purchase a new cabinet, keyboard and mouse for my computer. Since I couldn’t carry the cabinet on my motorcycle, I decided to take a bus to Nehru Place (Delhi’s largest computer market) and take an auto rickshaw while coming back.
It’s been 5 or 6 years, since I last used bus for commuting inside Delhi and I was looking forward to it. I got ready in the afternoon and reached the bus stop and waited for bus no. 864 (direct bus to Nehru Place) to arrive.
Half an hour passed (time it usually takes for me to reach Nehru Place) and still no sign of 864, in the meanwhile plenty of buses belonging to route no. 73, 108 and 680 had passed. I decided to wait a little longer, after waiting for well over an hour; there was still no sign of 864.
Fed up of heat and wastage of time, I decided to take an auto rickshaw to Nehru Place. Now I am sitting in the auto rickshaw, watching its meter fly through rupee counter, as if it was paisa counter and cursing 864 for not showing up. I am distracted from these thoughts every few minutes as the auto rickshaw driver thinks he is the king of the road and can drive whichever way he wants, and every other car driver in the city feels they can bully up an auto rickshaw and get right of way.
Even though I told the auto rickshaw driver that there might be traffic snarls at South Ex. he still insists on taking sticking to ring road, which according to him has less traffic than outer ring road. Pretty soon we are caught in a long traffic jam which starts from the middle of AIIMS flyover!
After taking over 20 minutes to cover couple of km long stretch between AIIMS flyover and Andrews Ganj flyover, my Einstein auto rickshaw driver feels that outer ring road would be much better and takes the diversion for it and sure enough it is a smooth run till Nehru Place!
As I get off from auto rickshaw, having wasted 3.5 times the time it normally takes to reach Nehru Place, having spent 5 times more than what I would have had I came here on my own motorcycle and 12.5 times more if that 864 bus had shown up, I couldn’t help but picture myself writing a blog post about, why I hate public transport!
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