Hasn’t the weather been gor­geous? The only prob­lem of course, is that when it starts rain­ing, the roads get mucky, the ricks totally dis­ap­pear and the cab­bies take ages to appear. Or so I found out this Sat­ur­day when I had a din­ner invi­ta­tion in the evening. I called about 3 city taxi ser­vices to be told (rather rudely) that there were no vehi­cles in my area. One of them even hung up on me, when I was mid-way into the call! Finally, I got some­one who was ready to accept my money in exchange for a ride! Boy, was I relieved. For a moment, I thought money had gone out of fash­ion and no one cared about it anymore.

I’ve been hav­ing rather bad trav­el­ing expe­ri­ences lately. My col­league dropped me off at Fab India one evening after work. I did my shop­ping. Walked out and looked around for a rick. Waited. Looked around. Of course, there was absolutely not one that was empty or wanted to go in the direc­tion I was going! Finally, I had to walk home.

Another time, a rick dri­ver abused me because I didn’t tell him I was going off the main road. He raved and ranted and though I didn’t under­stand what he was say­ing; the part I under­stood was that wanted more money because he had to do a detour of 2 min­utes from the main road. I’ve noticed that the major­ity of dri­vers are here are pretty unfriendly and never have change. Arggh. Or maybe they just see an invis­i­ble sign say­ing ‘non-Kannada speak­ing alien’ across my forehead.

My friend used to crib about the really bad traf­fic rules in Ban­ga­lore and I never believed it. I thought this was an ideal city where no one breaks traf­fic rules and peo­ple are polite and every­one gives way. Boy, was I wrong as I’ve dis­cov­ered within one month here!

Any­way, I had a really funny expe­ri­ence at the learner’s license test cen­tre on Sat­ur­day. They put 20 of us in a room, where we had these buzzers with three colours on them (red, yel­low, green), mak­ing us feel like Kaun Banega Crorepati con­tes­tants, when actu­ally it was like, Who is going to get a learner’s license today test. They had really hard ques­tions like, What do you in a silent zone a) Blow your horn, b) Don’t blow your horn; c) Blow your horn at your own discretion.

And another beauty. Which side of the road do you drive while tak­ing a left turn? a) Left hand side, b) Right hand side, c) cen­tre. The rea­son I am call­ing it hard is because there were peo­ple who failed the test with marks with 6 and 7 out of 15 ques­tions. Thus mak­ing it quite clear why Ban­ga­lore has so many rash and non-traffic abid­ing drivers!

This was also the first time I actu­ally gave an ‘auto­mated’ test. Last time I had got­ten a license, it was through other means. I won’t divulge the loca­tion where I got it, since I don’t want to get any­one into trou­ble. So any­way, I didn’t have to answer any ques­tions or for any test. And you’d also be relieved to know that I never drove using that license.

I was also rather pleased when the test scores were announced and I had scored full marks. Mak­ing it the only one in my life. And con­sid­er­ing how hard it was, I cel­e­brated well through Sunday!