When you have lived in a city all your life, long commutes is the staple diet you grew up on, especially when that city is Mumbai. (Or Thane as some of you may be quick to point out! Really, it is one and the same thing!) Mumbai is a beautiful city, my favourite and the only place I would ever want to live in. The beaches, the food, and the people everything about Mumbai is just wonderful. Okay, now I could go on and on about ‘the-most-awesome-city-ever’, and besides it probably deserves a different post with uncompromised attention so more on that later. So, if there’s anything about this city that I am not totally in love with and even remotely dislike it is commuting. Mumbai is excruciatingly big or rather long for one and added to it has way more people and consequently vehicles than it can accommodate. So the routes to reach from one place to another may anyway be rather long and then add to it a dash of the notorious Mumbai traffic and you have the perfect recipe for a painfully long travel. Mumbai commutes are something you complain about a lot when you first face them, accept over time and may even talk about them with some affection given long enough.
Even then the daily commute to the HPCL refinery where I was interning this summer seemed like a daunting task, after all spending the last two years of your life in a campus, especially one in a place as remote as Roorkee come with its share of habits, some not so good. I was apprehensive about the commute and I wasn’t wrong to be so. For the time I spent travelling daily easily exceeds three hours and utilises three different modes of public transportation. The day starts with leaving home at 6:30 praying to dear lord, that one finds an auto close enough to get to the railway station. There one runs and scampers to get on to the first local possible and then hang on to it for dear life for the next thirty minutes. Getting to sit is a luxury. With this the self successfully completes the first two chapters of the three-part journey. (Yeah, it is long enough to be called a journey!) And then the final segment- taking the BEST bus to the refinery, which has been built at what, is possibly the most remote corner of the city. But that of course is only after the obvious wait for the bus at the bus stop and then rushing to get one at least partially inside the bus before the driver decides to take off. (His leaving is independent of whether people are still climbing in). Then follows a long bumpy bus ride that goes over numerous potholes and makes way through half a dozen development projects which were supposed to have been completed six months back. And if it’s raining, then dear lord bless you! And with this the long journey is finally completed.
There also is an obvious return journey that retraces the same path and is only longer (credits to higher traffic at that hour of the day) and consequently more painful. Of course, the return journey happens only after a hard days work at HPCL, but we’ll come to that later and anyway the most significant thing on my mind with regards to the intern right now is the commute.
So I am destined to travel along this painful route twice a day at least for the next five weeks. Let’s hope that, just as most Mumbaikars would, I get used to and maybe even miss it once I am back to R-land.
