Jammers unite!

It’s 6.20 pm (Time Zone: GMT + 0700). I’m sitting in a taxi. Have been sitting in it for the past 45 minutes. I am now half-way to my destination. Ideally, I should have reached my destination ten minutes ago, but then how would I have got the chance to write today?! Guess what I’m thinking of at the moment?... the situation that I am currently in – a traffic jam!

Now I’ve been in traffic jams several times before this, in several different situations, in several cities, in several countries. The things that go through my mind in the first moment of realisation that I’m stuck, however, are remarkably (!) the same. How and why did I get onto this route?! What could I have done to avoid this? What are the follow-on effects of this delay??

Maybe I should be a little forgiving. Maybe I should think about other things that might actually make my life easier. So what goes through my mind in the next moments after that first one?

When I was stuck on Andheri-Kurla Road in Mumbai in peak hour traffic for 55 minutes on a stretch that should have taken 12, all because the municipal corporation had dug up the pot-holed roadsides reducing the motorable road to half its size, I thought about whether I would be around to see when the road was a four-lane highway.

When I was being driven to my home in the suburbs of Mumbai on July 27th 2005, I thanked God for keeping me dry and safe at a time when the incessant rains had taken so many lives in the city, let alone destroying the homes of tens of thousands more.

When I was returning from my local bazaar tour of Chatu-chak market in Bangkok, I took the opportunity to appreciate the colourful costumes of some of the older generation Thai locals, and the happy co-existence of the uncovered, polluting tuk-tuk (Thai version of the Indian auto-rickshaw) with the latest versions of luxury cars on the same road.

In Kuala Lumpur, I could see the Petronas twin towers (next to which my office is located) from the entrance of my hotel’s lobby. The distance of 1.5 kilometres, easily walkable in 20 minutes, took more than 35 minutes to drive through. I wondered whether mankind had traded efficiency, health, frugality and peace of mind for wastage, arteriosclerosis and environmental deterioration.

In London, I almost started to agree with the logic behind such a hefty congestion charge (GBP 5.00) for each entry into Zone 1, the city centre, during the peak hours.

Now, as I sit in this high-end air-conditioned taxi in Jakarta, protected from the sultry heat and smoke that’s on the outside, I think first of the cabbie who is being robbed, literally, because the taxi-meter runs on distance rather than any combination of that and waiting time. Yet he manages to smile at our predicament and proposes a solution in his broken English. A weak solution, but a solution nevertheless. I shall give him a decent tip.

Next, I think of the multitudes across the globe trying to get somewhere. The vehicles on the roads have increased by an order of magnitude from the number there were five years ago. Cheaper cars, more cars, more people, more cars, higher income, more cars, sometimes more roads too, but mostly, more jams!! Man tries to devise methods to reduce the time required for any activity. The better he is able to do it, the more he rewards himself – the youngest scientist award, the child prodigy, the fastest man on earth. Where do traffic jams fit in? I am now about a quarter of the way to my hotel, the destination. It’s 7.20 pm.

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The best way to forget all your troubles is to wear tight shoes. :D