Bus bahut hua

From the Author's keyboard: Before my readers swoon on seeing the title, I would like to warn all of you that this post is biligual, primarily because I wanted to relate it verbatim.

My trials and tribulations with the public transport system in Pune are almost never over. Once again I had the doomed misfortune of traveling in one of those magnificent modes of conveyance. This time however it wasn’t the vehicle itself that peeved me, but the customer support personnel..errr a rather contemporary designation for a bus conductor.

On landing amidst a sea of dilapidated steel gargoyles at the corporation bus stand, I felt rather like a lost lamb. “Ask ask ask” I told myself. Spotting a booth which looked like a miniature gaol with a grill through which even a caterpillar cannot pass without getting squished, I strained to make eye contact with the jailbird sitting in solitary confinement.

Readers please bear with me for the switch in language (that’s a first time on my blog)
Me: Hinjewadi la kuthli bus zatey? (Which bus goes to Hinjewadi?)
Jail bird (JB) aka in-charge: Hinjewadi la Hinjewadi chi bus zatey? (The bus to Hinjewadi goes to Hinjewadi)
Me: Yeah right you demented fool! I thought the bus to Hinjewadi goes to the moon!
(And returning to sanity) Me :Buscha number kay ahe? (What is the bus number?)
JB (arbitrarily does a mathematical calculation with Jacobian transforms): Shambhar. (100)
And before I could further tax his mathematically challenged brain he said: Pula palikade thambli ahe. (It’s parked across the bridge)

JB furiously starts scribbling on a piece of paper and I scamper off without asking for the latitude and longitude. Much later I figured I should have asked except that I didn’t know what latitude and longitude were called in Marathi. Ambling across the road and encountering a humongous stream of PMTs, I posed the same question to another bus conductor.

BC1: Tee bagha lasht (gasp! English?) ubhi ahe. (See that one parked last)

By the time I walked to the end of the endless queue of decrepit buses that deserved a collective cremation at a bus graveyard or at least an oldage home, I started wondering if BC1 had a chip implanted in his eye for him to be able to see a bus light years away from him! The bus driver was chewing tobacco like a cow ruminating its cud and reading the latest local gossip in a Marathi newspaper. I posed the eternally confounding question, “Hinjewadi la kuthli bus zatey”. He looked up; vexed by the intervention in his spiritual train of thoughts, and seeing his bloodshot eyes I beat a hasty retreat. I decided I needed a more reliable source of information.
Approaching an officer (yeah he could read and write) surrounded by BCs who were reporting to him, I thought this is the enlightened man who would direct a poor desultory soul like me to the correct bus, but he seemed to be working on the Riemann hypothesis. Even so, I decided to bother him with the mundane question which had nothing to do with prime numbers. He did not even acknowledge the question as his stooges tried to redirect me with, “Kuthe tari ahe”. (It is there somewhere). Voila, so that ascertains that the bus is not an imaginary number! Pointing to one of the other sycophants, he said, "Ha tya buscha conductor ahe" (He is the conductor of that bus). And after what looked like a charade of feigned ignorance and amnesia, BC2 finally admitted that the bus will indeed arrive soon and I did not want to clarify whether "soon" was in terms of hours or decades or millennia.

Later in the bus as I amused myself with the interior decor of the bus, BC2 came around issuing tickets. He used his clipper to awaken dozing souls to a reality that their hair or ears could get potentially clipped if they tried to travel ticketless. The macabre creature also loved playing a little game, keeping with the sinister intentions of those of his ilk. Just as the bus would screech to halt at a bus stop, he would ring the bell leaving the hapless travellers with less than 2 nanoseconds to clamber onto it or at least grab the sleeve of the person before them. They would dangle precariously onto a miniscule metallic protrusion. To add to his malevolence he would demand "Mala sutte dya." (Give me change) like we had a mint in our backyards. Thankfully he didn't say,"Mala sutka dya" (Relieve me of this). We would have gladly obliged.

After a bus ride which was nothing short of a Bollywood masala pot-boiler with a jailbird, a sadhu, a mad scientist and a barber moonlighting as bus conductors and drivers with wild-goose chases, amnesia and trapeze stunts, I was convinced that such a wholesome customer experience has no peer across the globe.

Last heard: Due to the increasing popularity of Bollywood and CTM a bid was being made to outsource jobs of First bus personnel to India.