Travelling to and from work, by road in Mumbai takes up quite a bit of time. The state of the roads and the ever increasing traffic add to the frustration. Especially if you happen to be driving yourself.

To cope with this, I sometimes surf the FM radio channels listening to the music, the chatter of the RJ’s and the views of the occasional caller on air. Besides entertainment, it is often a source of news and local events.

At other times I work on a mind exercise, the objective being to consciously try and stay in a calm state of mind. Trust me when I say that it is easier said than done. It means having to risk your vehicles suspensions over bad roads or slowing down to a crawl. It means restraining yourself from yelling at the next driver, who is squeezing you onto the pavement, because he just woke up and is now making a desparate left turn. It means accepting that auto-rickshaws don’t follow most laws of physics, and that might is right, when a bus decides to simply cut you and enter into the flow of traffic. And so on… If I manage to arrive at my destination in a reasonalbly calm state of mind, its an achievement to be proud of :)

Sometime ago, I chanced upon another option: talking on the cell phone. A friend called while I was driving back. We’d been out of touch and ended up chatting for quite a while. I used a handsfree earpiece. Before I realised it, most of the journey was over. Quite pleasantly. Now this seems great. It would probably allow me to stay in touch with people (which is always a challenge in city-life) and I would no longer need to wrestle with the state of my mind.

And then, yesterday I read this: Cell Phone Use Ages Young Drivers. It advises against the use of a cell phone while driving, even handsfree phones. The story is poorly titled IMHO, but worth a read.

Now what?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 4th, 2005 at 7:09 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.