Traffic - Which way ?
Chennai roads were blocked this morning. Completely. No , not blocked by the police - blocked by traffic. I guess this was the worst traffic day Chennai had to see. Actually traffic's been bad since yesterday evening. I did ask a couple of people - looks like everyone's had a bad time.
It took me one hour and fifty minutes (Iam not exaggerating) to reach Alwarpet from Velachery . And I have this habit of reaching office really early ! Iam usually in office by 830 AM Max. I could not drive beyond gear 2 and I think I must have emptied atleast a litre of petrol in excess.
So I was trying to analyse the reasons for this traffic circus today :
- Vadapalani Temple Kumbabhishekham was scheduled for today. As we all know , the traffic in Vadapalani is pretty bad on normal days itself. Today , they had re routed the traffic on Vadapalani - Kodambakkam road - in effect congesting other roads
- Schools reopened today after a couple of days of holidays ( Onam , Varalakshmi Nombu etc). This added to the traffic
- Lot of traffic routes have been changed across the city. I think the morning papers carried the route diagrams as usual
- The number of traffic policemen on the road were less today
- The traffic signals were not working
- And above all , no one was being patient enough to listen to good old samaritans / policemen who were clearing the jams wherever they were :P
And these are the times when you should sit back , roll down the windows ( the weather is exceptionally pleasant in Chennai these days) , and turn up the volume and listen to your favorite songs which you dont get time to ! :)
Human Rights ?
Whatever happened to it , I wonder.
I was watching some of the news channels this morning. This issue caught my attention :
A jewel thief in Bhagalpur in Bihar caught red handed while attempting to snatch a woman's chain was mobbed by the public. The video footage showed images of the thief being beaten up by the public , flogged with a belt , later his hands tied , he was tied to a motorcycle which was driven by a policeman !!!
Catch more of it here : http://broadband.indiatimes.com/videoshow/2316913.cms
So the news channel went on to say that the National Human Rights Comission is investigating into the issue and that the thief is in hospital. The local political parties meanwhile ,have made this a political issue. I beleive two policemen have been suspended. The opposition has called this a communal issue. They are blaming Nitish Kumar for the incident.They have also brought out casteism into this - the thief was a muslim !!
By flashing the same video time and again on every news channel , Iam wondering what it is that they are trying to acheive. Ok , it was wrong that the Public and Police treated him that way. But for heaven's sake , this is Bihar and we are talking about someone who snatched a chain (Isnt that robbery? - Section 397 of IPC ?)
And in all this hullaboo - what happened to the robber ? Is he alive / dead ?
Weird world, truly !
SSDD
For those of you who dont know what that means - its "Same Sh*t , Different Day". Thats how the day was today.
Nothing much to post about anyway. But nevertheless have resolved to blog atleast once a day (Now lets see how far I get) except maybe on sundays :)
If there is anything interesting that happened , it was this single cake jinx up episode in office..... In my office, we have this habit of cutting a cake for someone's b'day. So today happened to be a fellow co-worker's bday. The cake arrives , we all gather and open the box - and guess what ? The cake has someone else's name on it...:)) Luckily the nomenclature was done in cream so it was easier to smudge the name off anyway .
If at all , I guess that gives you an idea how the day was ......
SSDD
Which is more Shameful ?
If you did manage to flip through the Chennai edition of The Hindu today - the front page carried the Photograph of a mother sobbing over the corpse of her 18-year old daughter killed in the Hyderabad Blasts. It so sad to notice the number of families that have been affected due to the sick mind of the terrorists. Yet another Photograph showed a sister crying over her brethren who were killed in the blasts - her brother , his wife and their two children !! What is going on in this world I wonder.
If you'd scanned the paper a little bit more - there was a small column mentioning the suspension of the constable who hugged Sanjay Dutt when he came out of prison !! And yet another column which talks of (with pictures ofcourse ) Katrina Kaif visiting Sallu dada in prison !Iam wondering what our priorities are in life. All news channels seem to be carrying these bits of news - not necessarily in that order ! I wonder why so much of publicity and hype. Okay , they are celebrities , but for heaven's sake - they are criminals in the eyes of law - Can we stop giving them Demi-God Status ??
And I still wonder what I could do for the blast victims sitting here.....Apart from just pray that more blasts dont happen and also that God should give the families of the victims enough courage to overcome this great loss !
