Bangalore: The Garden City or the City of Bangalore (Bengaluru) has known to be a harbinger in many aspects as far India is concerned. While people in rest of India were still looking up in the sky in order to irrigate their crops with rain water, people in Bangalore were thinking ways of loosening up the pockets of people in USA who were looking for cheap labor, thus making itself the Silicon Valley of India. Bangalore became the first city in India to get electricity. It was the first City to get an Internet Service Provider and similarly, it has been the first to achieve things, other cities could only dream of achieving.
While Bangalore was still in its nappy as in infancy, after the British had left, it gradually became Pensioner’s Paradise. Army Personnel and other retired people got shifted to Bangalore because of its delightful climate and peaceful environment. The city boasted of many gardens from which it bears the nickname ‘The Garden City’. This concept of making the city Garden-like, though, had some ill-effects which could have not been thought by the people then. As garden has narrow walkways, the architects of the city thought of playing a practical joke with the future residents of the city by making the main roads and streets as narrow as possible. Their vision of future Bangalore was as narrow as the possible and so they kept up with the legacy of being the first city to make narrow roads with heaviest traffic.
In a recent study, it was found that the traffic running on the roads of Bangalore is so slow because of pathetic traffic condition that even atomic clocks are finding it difficult to measure the speed. Chief Assistant of Bangalore Development Authority’s youngest son’s Girlfriend who also happens to be a team member of the research organization Search for Lethargic Objects WorldWide or S.L.O.W. told us that they came up with the speeds of lowest objects on this planet and surprisingly they found that Bangalore traffic is slower than the slowest of the slowest things possible. While it takes 1 minute for a snail to travel 1 cm, it takes hours for a vehicle to even shake a bit to be measured. Turtle, Sloth all travel faster than the Bangalore Traffic. In some weird cases it was observed that it might take more than to deliver a baby from conception than crossing an important junction of the city called as ‘Silk Board’. Of course we are talking about the gestation period of Eastern quoll of Australia and not humans. Though she added that it might be unjust to compare living entities with the speed of traffic. So, she showed the stats and figures that proved that even the Indian Postal Service can be called lightening fast when compared to BT. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the former Prime Minister of the country, was known to complete his speech in lesser time as compared to time taken to cross Brigade Road on a vehicle.
Another series of experiments like time taken for ketchup to drip completely from a bottle was compared with the time taken to cross the Marathalli bridge, the time taken to login to Airtel’s Website was compared with the time taken to cross the Graphite India red light signal in Whitefield, the duration of an Ashutosh Govarikar movie was compared to the time taken in turning towards NGV from Forum Mall in Kormangala showed the same story that everything other than the traffic moved faster.
Initially, the study suggested that there are only pockets of city where the air is thicker as compared to the rest of the city. Thus, the viscosity of the air makes travel difficult. But then it was soon realized when the device used to measure viscosity viscometers didn’t reach at all the places because of the traffic itself and they had to be returned back. They were on rent, for your information. The traffic police was not shy in poking fun at the fate of the people who travel on Bangalore roads by creating an outrageous upper limit of 60 KMPH for all vehicles. Demonstrations were held at Freedom Park against this inhumane sarcasm on the part of the traffic police. Though the demonstrations were not attended by much as they were stranded and stuck at traffic lights at various parts of the city so they were called off soon. To add to the fun, the BDA decided to start as many as 6 flyovers, underpasses on Outer Ring Road where there is basically no need but since they had extra money so no one complained.
To help the commuters from this draconian task of travelling on the roads, Namma Metro was devised and after spending millions of Rupees, the services finally started between places where there was no need of metro.
Finally, the research came to a conclusion that Bangalore can be a perfect spot for testing the Einstein Theory of Time Dilation as people travelling in other cities as compared to those who were on the roads of Bangalore tend to age quicker. Therefore, once again, living up with the tradition, Bangalore has been named as the first slow-motion city of India.
– An Agent Foobar’s Exclusive.
