Political Dictatorship

13th May 2008.
Tuesday 1800 hrs.
Tuesday, the first official working day of the week(As on Monday people normally recuperate from the weekend hangover). So obviously I was a bit strained. I left from my office at Hinjewadi on my bike. Traffic was as usual at its best. Somehow I managed to clear through the irritating traffic of Hinjewadi village and made it to the Wakad bridge and as soon as I crossed the bridge, I saw another traffic jam. It wasn't a new thing as the small croosroad after the bridge is always jammed. But as I neared the crossroad, I saw that the traffic was extending beyond it. I started to use the technique which I had learnt while manoeuvring through Hosur Road in Bangalore(trust me, its one of the most hopeless road to drive on with trucks, trailers, hoards of buses, swanky SUVs, cars and two wheelers-- all in the exponential quantities, specially on weekday evenings. Bangalore folks will definitely agree on this.) Anyways Pune is not that far behind Bangalore when it comes to traffic. As I started moving forward, I saw the traffic line as long as I could lay my eyes upon. This was not normal. I hoped it wasn't an accident. Last thing I wanted to see was a gory sight of accident on this messy evening. I kept on moving forward, sometimes at the kuccha road on left of the road or sometimes in the wrong lane to the right. There was no traffic coming from opposite side. I wondered what must be the problem. At last reached the spot where I found a deadlock between a truck coming from opposite side and a bus in my lane. I started cursing these drivers for the stupid mess they had put the me and all the other people behind me. Almost I must have crossed not less than 200 cars and about 50 buses and uncountable number of 2 wheelers. I saw on my speedo that the traffic jam longed for more than 2 km and it took me almost 15 mins to cross that. I managed to cross the bus and that's when I got a real shock. In front of the bus was a grandly decorated truck with loud music being played in from of it. I was not able to see exactly what was all this fuss about. Just then a biker besides me found a detour. He took his bike from above a closed manhole cover onto a small ground which joined the road after about 200m. I gladly followed him. When I made it to the ground, I saw the correct picture. The vehicle belonged to some political party and they seemed to be in festive mood celebrating with all the "sandaal"(Hey! not a girl's sandal. Its a group of drummers who play number of big drums(dholaks) in sync. The noise is comparable to some big DJ night. May be more than that). No one knew what they were celebrating. All I could see was the helplessness on the face of all the commuters who were facing the brunt of this foolish act of the nonsense political party people(goondas to be precise). They were not at all concerned about the trouble they were causing almost thousand people because of this so called celebration of theirs. Had it been some college students dancing on road, people might have swoop them in no time. But as these people are known to have a hand above their head which everybody knows, so no one dared even to talk to them.

Such is the situation in our Democratic India, where all the political parties are free to carry out whatever they want. No one can voice their opinion against them ,because if they do, they know the consequences.
Hey!! am I seeing a Hitler in making??