The Bus..!!

Be it any class of a bus ride, I’ve always been fascinated with the very idea of the millions of faces you meet on em & the mannerisms you get to witness.

Right from the first bus that took me to the nursery I was enrolled in…..to the public transport… to my school bus & the latest being the bus I travel to my workplace in. All different shapes and sizes & colours so vivid that it gets your imagination runnin… both the passengers & the vehicles….lol

I remember in nursery there used to be this real naughty kid with a handkerchief dangling from his right pocket, typically pink with a few flowers adorning the borders. He never seemed to have his bottom side affixed to one particular seat in the vehicle, he seemed to have roller blades attached to his back…..Shakespeare would term it as obnoxiously Restless….lol…

And you reach your nursery…. Everybody shoving to get off & still some people living their dream not ready to accept that it is another day of discipline rather than fun…… that continues to this very day though… coz I was one of em in every aspect… I wonder if I had skates attached to my neck though….lol

Then there was the school bus where initially we were dressed smart in or whit & greys with a tie hangin like a noose around the neck, again living that very dream we were referring to a earlier..lol… But I always looked up in awe and excitement to those smart dudes in grey & grey christening them as seniors & wondered how would their shoes feel to be put into.(Only dudes coz we had a shift system..Boy the assembly time in school was hilarious..lol )

The driver of the bus was a sweetheart nevertheless… he was sumbody all kids would look up2 as a human being. Having lunch in a hurry ( My Mom used to fed me for a realllllllllly long time coz I was absolutely in love with the concept of eating you see…lol) … putting on your shoes…..managing to forget one book off your timetable… looking forward to the games period ( where we have almost 10 teams playing on the same football field…lol ) …waiting for the recess bell… savouring every moment of the aluminium cricket ball etc….. And this went on all the way from the 1st grade to the 12th grade ( Yep!!.... I was in the same school).

I almost forgot the bus I was to talk bout… initially it woz white in colour ( Non A/c) & evolved into a cassata ice cream coloured A/c bus at the end of my tenure as a senior in school. We always had a gang of people who were there all through my senior part of school.

Thru school , the characters & the mannerisms of all of us was almost the same….. the same age group & thought alike… all spoilt brats..hahaha.. All of us wondering when we would get ourselves promoted from white & grey to grey & grey ( As a kid though it was more white & blue)… What shall I say.. School Revamped…lol!!

During college though… the only bus I did travel in was the public transport. And now there start the mannerisms & characters & faces that I thought of writing about. The faces I must say varies from a really angry face to a face that could brighten up your morning. Characters vary from silent & sober to really noisy & irritating. Mannerisms range from real cute baby gestures to people struggling to survive.

The transaction of the ticket in a bus does bring most of these features to light. You might have a person who’d be shouting at the top of his voice coz he got into the wrong bus & the conductor issued him a wrong ticket…beat that…lol.

You have many other who realize its their mistake & opt to silently walk out when the closest bus stop arrives. Still others who are speaking to their neighbours as if they have known him/her before the Big Bang theory occurred. Many of them stuffing themselves into the bus even when the place for a needle to be pushed in would be a luxury … People hanging onto a bar on the footboard & speaking on their cell phones as if they were lying on a beach with a beer in their left hand … lol … But I always used to admire babies who are way away from all these emotions… I believe their reactions are more binary like… either you laugh or you cry .. That’s wot I call pure bliss.

And these buses I’d say would be something as ancient as the Himalayas probably…. A 0 percent guarantee that you would reach your destination in the speculated time or even an hour after… coz the probability of a breakdown is high.. lol.. They were red in colour initially though a couple of stripes in yellow & black were add ons at a later point in time…. PMT Revamped..!!

The most prominent feature of the office bus is SLEEP… a blissful one hour of cramped up but heavenly sleep early in the morning…lol..

Waking up a little late…. Hurrying through with your morning routines… having breakfast as if you’ve never seen edible stuff before…. Running down… watching school kids waiting for their buses (prominent green uniforms) …walking towards the bus to find fellow colleagues waiting for the Blue striped white bus or shall I say White striped blue bus (very confusing) with a printout(people call that a board) specifying SUS rd on it, waiting for everyone to board it.

We have the head of travel… without whom the bus wouldn’t move an inch… mine’s the first pickup on the route. It then proceeds to the next stop picking up people with a vivid sense of colours to dress themselves up. But overall it goes through about 8 to 10 stops all over the city before it hits the highway.

Here you have people who speak for a while, say bout 10-15 mins to your neighbours and immediately retire into “ Nidra” …blissful…lol ( I am one of em…. “ Not used to wakin up so early” …. Is the primary cause for this pleasurable experience…lol ) … Then you have people who feel reading a book with good music to soothen their morning is a gud entertainer…you still have more people who believe good music will see them through a torturous one hour roller coaster… then there are others cursing fate for giving them a laptop to work on & carry. The way people search for seats as soon as they board the bus is a sight worth witnessing…. Then the final set would be people who have been sitting close to each other for years now but haven’t spoken a word… lol!!

When you leave for the day you have to literally search for the bus that would reach you back home. The 18:00 bus is okie… coz you’l get home in a jiffy (One hour).. The 19:00 bus takes you on a city tour with the traffic of another IT park cutting of the roads. There’s another one at 20:00… which I haven’t had the luck of experiencing. The 18:00 is white in colour with a green board. The 19:00 is the confusing blue & white.

The main agenda for the evenings too is blissful “ Nidra”.. lol the routes are different but I must say very well organized for an organization encompassing a figure of close to 2000 employees in the middle of nowhere.

I always wonder as to how everything comes around a whole full circle! From the colour white … From being a school kid waiting for the bus to watching kids waiting when u still are going to catch the vehicle. Experiences like this BUS I’m sure are many more & would be awesome to Rewind… Play… Stop… Play…. & it goes on!!

CheerS!!

Ajay Padattil
06/07/2010