Quite a Rant!

Now, the place where we had to head to attend our workshop, was Noida, situated in the state of Uttar Pradesh, and at a little distance from Delhi itself. Unfortunately, I hated the place! Overcrowded and congested, Noida was a complete disappointment! After the broad roads and mostly followed rules and regulations (I'm talking about the traffic rules, of course!) in Delhi, Noida was a let down! Not only did people care zilch about others on the road, they seemed strangely flippant about their own safety too! The roads (if you can call them that!) were almost always choc-a-block, with cars, two wheelers, cycle rickshaws, auto rickshaws, and plenty animals also, making their presence felt at all times of the day! Not to mention the plopping of innumerable stalls and tiny shops on both sides of the side lanes and sometimes even the main roads, making it even more difficult to manoeuvre vehicles on the narrow stretches of roads that resulted because of all this overcrowding on limited space!

Cycle rickshaws, those flimsy little things, are a very popular mode of transport there. We had the same things in Calcutta too, and I guess, still have, but somehow the ones in Noida seemed to be so flimsy as to be prone to coming apart at the slightest hint of a more than normal push or shove! Not that the passengers or the rickshaw walla himself seemed to take the slightest notice of such petty things! Added to it, the sight of watching a fellow human being furiously struggle to pedal with tons of human butts resting on the seat of the rickshaw, is not a very pleasant thing to watch! Also, considering that the weather Gods are not exactly conducive to smiling down at UP in the midst of summer, leaves the poor rickshaw pedaller with beads of sweat on his brows and a damp vest on his back! Not having any other means of commuting between our hotel and our place of work, we also resorted to this almost inhuman way of reaching our destination. Of course, it can be argued that we were contributing to his share of the daily bread, but, oh well!

Our first ride on that seemingly doomed vehicle had us holding on for our dear lives! The other machine powered vehicles on the road have absolutely no patience with this measly thing passing as a vehicle! After shrieking honks galore, angry shouts and snarls, and the choicest of abuses thrown at him, the human pedaller would pedal as furiously as he could, using all his reserves of energy, and move aside, and let the beast of a bus or even a not much better kinetic, zoom away! Unfortunately, that's not all! The puny vehicle also has to circumnavigate around buses and trucks that decide that driving on the wrong side, nay, from the wrong direction even, is their birthright! This leaves the rickshaw squirming and its tyres squealing, to quickly move out of the way of a sure head on collision! After braving all this a couple of times, all the time praying that my accident prone self does not deem it right to raise its ugly head those very times, my friend and I decided to give the whole thing a miss and rely on our faithful limbs instead! So walk we did, the whole of the stretch. With the sun being extremely considerate and us smelling like two freshly rolled in the mud pigs, the next day saw us holding onto the flimsy sides of the measly vehicle once again! So much for bravado! Of course, we did have to hit something after five days of riding on those vehicles of death! So hit we did, on the last day of our stay in Noida, and as an added bonus, not one, but two monstrous (by comparison) vehicles! Thankfully, it was not a hit hit, more like a kiss on the bumper of a car and a smooch on the bonnet of a truck! Phew!

Of course, Noida has its fair share of fancy malls and helpful eat outs, but the traffic situation and the ongoing construction work (Metro), with the roads all dug up and gouged out, doesn't really make for a very pleasant experience! I must also bring to notice that it's not to say that everything is hunky dory in Delhi. In fact, the whole of the week that we were there, the newspapers carried innumerable accident stories, most of them caused by the BlueLine buses in Delhi. As a result, these buses have now been taken off the road. Nevertheless, absolutely nothing I have seen till now even comes close to the chaos and utter disrespect for lives and rules that we witnessed in Noida!