How I took a bus back to advertising!

that's me in the corner...

It’s been nine months since I have been in this city. Looks like I have become immune to the hands of the clock and the flipping pages of a calendar. I have become immune to time. To justify, I am still finding it hard to digest the fact that it’s nearly been a year since Delhi saw the last of me. Good riddance, we’d both say!

Apart from time, the other thing that has glaringly avoided me is the public transport facility. Petrol prices are sky high, traffic is at its malicious best, driving is as tiring as a marathon; but when your friend has affectionately left his bike at home and deported himself across seven seas, the temptation and comfort are too much to resist. It is my first day at my new office and though I don’t care about first impressions- about bread and butter, I do. The temptation of the two-wheeler at one’s disposal had wooed my roommate at approximately 5:30 am in the morning and hence resulted my first bus ride.

I have enjoyed bus rides since college days. A seat by the window on the left side, (keeping in mind the right-hand drive in our country) drooling at the cute things at every stop is all I ever wanted inside a bus. Bumpy rides, torn seats with spring erections and bloodthirsty bugs are all ignored. A friend who was kind enough to drop me at the bus stop early in the morning helped me find this luxury without difficulty.

The engine growled to life (it was too arrogant to purr and didn’t have the energy to roar) within 15 minutes of my entrance. If I say I got Goosebumps, you’d call me a freak. Hence I won’t. If I were to, I’d be exaggerating. I’d be falsifying in order to attain an impact. In short, I’d be lying.

I get really excited when I travel through familiar territory. The thrill I get on predicting a turn or guessing the delay time between signals is quite unseen among humans. It is probably because of my general lack of road knowledge or my extremely poor sense of direction (I have once traveled around moolchand flyover 4 times before I could find my way back to the road). But there I was, sitting at my throne by the window, proudly analyzing roads and naming them in the process, loud enough for my fellow passengers to hear; foreseeing traffic jams with the finesse of Nostradamus and calculating the approximate time by which I’d reach the office! Quoting Jack Dawson from Titanic with slight alteration, “ I felt like the king of the world.”

I reached the office 15 minutes before time. The impression was made. Let me proudly state at this point of time that my travel time calculations were flawless. I walked up the stairs, looked at the lock on the door, returned to the stairs and lighted a cigarette. After a disappointing month at the call-centre, I was back where I supposedly belonged. I had taken a bus back to advertising!