Bangalore traffic is not a nuisance.
It’s a syllabus.
An open-university course on patience, delusion, and carbon emissions.
A daily exam that begins when you leave home
and ends when you stop believing in destinations.
You don’t drive in Bangalore.
You marinate in motion.
An unpaid extra in a city-wide slow-burn tragedy
called “commute.”
It teaches you that the universe doesn’t expand,
it congests.
That movement doesn’t always mean progress,
and sound doesn’t always mean communication.
Sometimes it’s just everyone honking at God
to do something about it.
Distance here isn’t measured in kilometers.
That’s for beginners.
We measure it in time, in mood swings, in emotional erosion.
Ten kilometers? That’s half an episode of despair.
Thirty? That’s a full season of regret.
Time, here, is a shapeshifter.
It bends around potholes,
melts at signals,
and folds neatly into excuses.
Moving forward doesn’t mean moving forward.
You could move five minutes deeper into forty-five minutes,
and somehow end up fifty minutes farther
from everything that matters.
That’s not traffic;
that’s time travel with insurance premiums.
Bangalore traffic teaches you faith.
Faith that your clutch will survive.
Faith that this green light means something.
Faith that this driver in front of you
will someday learn to use indicators
before retirement.
It teaches you patience,
but not by rewarding it,
by suffocating it
until you hallucinate enlightenment.
You don’t acquire calm;
you develop tolerance,
like immunity from optimism.
Knowing three alternate routes
from Indiranagar to HSR
isn’t intelligence;
it’s post-traumatic geography.
Because deep down, every Bangalorean knows:
there are no alternate routes.
Only alternate regrets.
You start believing in parallel universes —
one where Ejipura signal turns green,
one where Uber drivers don’t “cancel, boss,”
and one where the BBMP actually means “maintenance.”
We’ve found multiverse theory,
and it lives in Silk Board.
A thirty-minute drive becomes ninety
because a man sneezed near Marathahalli
and traffic took it personally.
Or a cow paused mid-road
to question capitalism.
Or someone ahead tried to “save time”
and cost everyone an eternity.
That’s when Bangalore traffic teaches you
its most profound lesson —
Good times are like weekends.
Everyone wants to relish them,
but not many have the patience
to wait their way to it.
Some honk.
Some weave.
Some overtake hope itself,
only to meet it again,
idling calmly at the next red light.
You learn that time isn’t a line, it’s a loop.
That the past, present, and future
are just three lanes of the same jam.
You learn that progress isn’t direction, it’s endurance.
That success is sometimes just not stalling.
That peace is not reaching early;
it’s accepting you won’t.
You learn that life doesn’t fix itself.
No honk fixes it.
No rage tweet does.
No god with traffic control powers descends.
You just keep adjusting.
Half a meter left, half a dream right.
That’s survival.
That’s Bangalore.
At the red lights, stories unfold —
a delivery boy rewriting physics,
a couple breaking up over Google Maps,
a coder rethinking existence,
a child selling roses
to people who forgot what tenderness smelled like.
And you,
somewhere between guilt and acceptance,
realize this isn’t chaos.
It’s choreography.
It rains when it wants,
like an emotional breakdown.
And everyone pretends to be surprised.
Umbrellas bloom like excuses.
Wipers move like resignation.
You whisper to yourself:
“Everything in Bangalore is seasonal,
everything except traffic.”
Then one day,
you stop complaining.
Because you realize:
the traffic isn’t outside you anymore.
It’s inside you.
Your thoughts crawl.
Your ambition idles.
Your sanity signals for a lane change.
You have become Bangalore traffic.
And when you finally reach your destination,
an hour late, a decade wiser,
you realize something beautiful, terrible, and true:
Bangalore traffic is not hell.
Hell has structure.
Hell has order.
Hell has closure.
Bangalore traffic has hope.
And that’s far more dangerous.
Because hope keeps you coming back.
Hope that tomorrow will be better.
Hope that someone will fix the roads.
Hope that someday,
the Ejipura signal will stay green long enough
for redemption.
That’s when you attain enlightenment —
not on a mountaintop,
but in first gear,
between a stalled bus and a cow that refuses to move,
humming hope under your breath:
“Maybe tomorrow will be smoother.”
And you smile,
because even if it isn’t,
you’ll still be here;
learning, crawling, existing,
and waiting your way to good times.
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