It wasn’t very long ago that the idea of going to office at the break of dawn ensconced itself inside my mind, this of course owing to the ridiculous amount of time I spend on the road trying to beat the traffic. I am quite certain that a lot of Bangaloreans would just shrug it away saying that you couldn’t expect more from a metropolitan, especially one which has a comparatively well-off population. Agreed, that this city is home to most of the IT world, but that doesn’t mean a guy like me, who has spent most of his life in a small town can come to terms with this daily torture.

I thought of the most obvious solution possible! Most people in the city are late sleepers. All I needed to do was to leave to office a little earlier than usual. That, I felt would do the trick. I decided to try it out the very next day. Armed with two alarms, I went to bed and got up dutifully at 5:45 the next morning. I was ready to leave by 6:45 and straddled my bike wearing an unusually smug smile. “Hah!”, I chirped feeling quite proud of myself. Today was the day I’d set my own fastest lap. I had to go from Jeevanbhimanagar to Mahadevapura and decided to take the K R Puram route. None of the signals were on and I managed to reach RMZ in no time. It had been quite a while since I’d hit 80 on the speedo, and boy was I making the most of it!

It was at that point of supreme happiness that I reached the flyover and what I saw, almost made me fall off the bike! Lo and behold! Rows and rows of bloody trucks! As far as the eye could see. Big trucks, small trucks and even a large number of buses! And what’s more, they were moving so slowly that I could have overtaken them even if I’d hopped on one leg. Nothing dashes your spirits as badly as a myriad languid trucks on the road ahead of you. After I’d finishing hurling every abuse I could think of at the damned trucks, I gave up, hoping for all of them to vanish miraculously. “God, give me a break!”, I pleaded appealing for divine intervention.

Fortunately for me, providence for some reason responded to my plea. The traffic lasted only till the end of the flyover and I reached my office in another few minutes. It was only when I saw my clenched jaw in the elevator mirror that I burst out laughing. Thank god for something called sense of humor I told myself. That was the last day I got up at 5:45!