Bengaluru goes Yellow with joy

Time of India

2 days ago

R Edwin Sudhir, a Bengaluru-based journalist and writer, has the interesting privilege of living in a once-sleepy town which has morphed into a city fast-forwarding into a connected world but sadly disconnected with the ground realities of more people competing for shrinking space. The experience is oddly exhilarating yet often mildly alarming for long-time residents who see how technology has transformed a sleepy beantown into a bustling boomtown. And swept its residents too in the headlong rush to keep pace. LESS ... MORE
Bengalureans have been twitching with excitement over the past few days, ever since the Yellow Line of the Namma Metro was inaugurated on Sunday.
But, that day, some on the subway's Green Line were not exactly thrilled when they found access to a few stations close to the inauguration venue blocked by policemen who directed them to a station about 2km away.
Why, when the inauguration was happening on the Yellow Line should the Green Line be affected was a logical question. But, often logic is the first casualty in such situations.
Anyway, they resigned themselves to their fate and made their way, mostly by autorickshaws whose drivers had an unexpected windfall, to the first open station located near a prominent college and then made their way to their final destinations on the Green and Purple lines.
I, for one, made the delightful acquaintance of a project manager of an IT major on the auto ride. After roundly cursing our luck which led to delayed meetings with our respective friends, we settled down to a genial conversation, comparing notes about salaries in IT companies and why X was better than Y, and how Z trumped both of them.
Meanwhile, we updated our waiting friends about our painful progress along the gridlocked roads and assured them we'd be there. Eventually.
Thanks to venting my anger to a sympathetic audience, I was reasonably calm when we parted ways at the said college station and left, without as much as a backward glance, to find the trains of our choice. It would have been nice to linger for a longer conversation but our waiting friends would never have forgiven us.
The Yellow Line excitement spilled over to the next day when it actually became operational. After many missed deadlines and timelines not worth the paper they were written on, techies heading to Electronic City could finally enjoy the comfort and speed of a Metro commute.
They rushed in large numbers, only to find there were fewer than optimum trains assigned to this route. Train sets were expected to arrive soon and help BMRCL increase the frequency. Industry leaders, who had chipped in with large sums of money for the construction of stations, celebrated the occasion on social media and a former foreign diplomat, once based in Bengaluru, even expressed her interest to come and take a ride.
The excitement continued till late into the night, when all the action switched to the Green Line — a young man jumped onto the track. Commuters on the halted train at the major interchange were asked to disembark and they milled around, hoping to pick up some scrap of information about what caused the delay.
The lack of any announcement by Namma Metro led to rumours doing the rounds. Contrast this with stories of drivers of delayed subway trains in Japan, which in itself is a rare event, coming to apologise personally to stranded commuters. Word filtered through the moving train that the young man had survived his brush with near death.
All's well that ends well and Bengalureans are now waiting with bated breath for the Pink and Blue Lines to get the green signal. It may take a while, but Bengalureans have learnt to be patient and hope it'll happen in their lifetime.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.