Daily Dabba Journey

What astonishes about the office shuttle is its ingenuity. It looks like its been reassembled from stolen automobile parts somewhere in the gullies of JC Road, yet I prefer its cozy, almost vulgarly dark inside to a super cool Volvo, mostly because it is free. 

My office shuttle is painted white and blue, the royal colours of the corporate world, not too showy, not too laid-back, just the right hues to spread the message of the noble corporate world. The architecture inside is a mechanical marvel, It shines with the sun and pours when it rains, taking us closer to nature everyday.

Before I proceed any further, please look at the pictures below:

Fig 1: Illustrates my imagination of the office bus when I was in college

Fig 2: Readers may assume whatever they want. 

Anyway, coming back to my story.

It carries the same set of people every single day, in varying degrees of droopiness. Some bury themselves in their newspapers, some stick plugs into their ears to drown the noise of the chaos outside, some sleep blissfully, and I have still not decided which group of people I belong to.

 I cannot sleep, I wish I was one of the people who doze like Kumbhkaran's long lost children, but alas! I am all but an owl in the tinted night of the bus. Initially, I used to take a different novel every week and try to read it, I don't remember half the stories. You see, the shuttle makes me semi-inebriated. 90% of the time, it doesn't budge, but when it does it makes sure that we all experience a Mexican wave. This makes reading a little too hard. Also I desperately try and make conversation with the neighbour, most of the time I get grunts in response but sometimes when the fellow-corpo (A corporate employee, inspired from the word 'psycho') also feels like talking, who am I to stop him? And he can't stop me too. So there goes the reading.

My friend advised me to use the time in the shuttle constructively, so I thought I'll meditate. It didn't work. I'm worse than the kid with ADD in Taare Zameen Par, so ahem! we all can guess how that ended. I tried people-watching for a while, but decided its not my cup of tea to watch people with their eyes closed and mouths wide open.

One unfortunate day, I thought I'll look outside the window. That day I remembered my high school physics lesson. I think the concept is called relative motion, I'm not sure. When you are in a moving vehicle, it seems like you are still and the world outside is moving. Strangely, I felt that neither of us are moving. I guess some laws of motion need to be rewritten for the Silk Board-Sarjapur stretch of Bangalore.

Recently, I discovered the joy of calling up some random friends from there. This is how it goes:

"Hello Loose..ellidya?" (Loose is our slang for chaddi buddies)

"You know what? S got married!!"

"Yaaaaa, She didn't invite us only alva?..Ganchali!" 

"Blah blah blah blah blah"

At this point, the uncle in front of me turns back and glowers at me as if I murdered his mistress. Two more uncle type stares later, I grudgingly cut the call.

Tell me what am I supposed to do in the bus?

PS: One girl who was sitting next me one fateful day said this about the abundance of air inside our bus:

"Can you please open the window? It is so "sophisticating" in here"

Citation: I first published this post on another blog that I started, frustratedofficegoer.blogspot.com on 29th Nov,2011.