The last fortnight of political parleying around Delhi by the BJP has been nothing short of showing off gloriously, the filth inside the party. Money doing the rounds, resorts getting business, MLAs on their ‘fitness’ regimes and a bullied crying CM on the TV. Well what can I say, its enough to beat the TRPs of any soap on TV. Add to that the decoration, music, lighting and thrill that TV9 adds to all this, and you have a real box office hit.

Give the opponents some reason and they are always available to whine away and bite more of the CMs flesh than they can chew. Also seated on the knife are cool headed, least bothered stalwarts from the chaddi wearing RSS. Throw a brick or a boulder at them and they still do what they do best. Laze around. Citizens always do what they have been doing. Crying hoarse over infrastructure instead of asking for some better governance in the first place. Any development whether literal or metaphorical can happen only when the game is played right. What we have are the politicians from the 50s and 70s era who are experienced at mud slinging rather than any developmental politics.

What did not take a Sadananda Gowda or a Venkiah Naidu or a LK Advani or a Rajnath, took one Sushma to solve?  And must we all believe a mining baron of 5500+ crores of income will listen to a matrushri rather than his own intuition? This has not only shown that no one in the top level of the party is capable of handling a crisis and unless these are all laid off  (corporate management rejig if i may call so), one can say a goodbye to BJP in the next elections as well. This notwithstanding the ‘success’ they have had locally.

Sobha is out (she deserved to, didn’t she?). Why would a revenue minister managing revenues of a mining department owned by his brother take easily a lady of rural development ministry questioning the ongoings between the former two ministries? Not only did she interfere there, but also managed to say ‘cheese’ in every photo having the CM leading to some ridiculously obvious rumours which were all unwarranted. Whatever the stature of the RSS lady, the final verdict is there on the wall. The IAS officers can never escape a transfer in their lives. It will be news if even one completes the full term in one place.

Now to the speaker (how ironical!). How many times have you heard Shettar actually speak? Or for that matter how many times have you heard about him in the newspapers that otherwise crow about Yeddy and Sobha beside him? Not even once. There is a serious problem in understanding that he actually holds any clout at all in the present scenario. Finished is the turn of the Reddy’s in gunning for Yeddy’s head. Now common opposition, its your freaking turn! Enjoy.

Who won this game? There is only one answer – the media. They enjoyed making a mockery of everyone including the public (yes us!). All the way upto showing on TV Yeddy and Reddy eating cake after cake shamelessly without any explanation.

Alright now enough of this masala movie. Get back to your favourite soap on TV guys!

Alright, we do understand that the BJP wants to do something useful in the city in the five years they have got, so as to come to power again. One must appreciate they are atleast receptive to what people’s need maybe, whether they are able to fulfill them or not.

So here goes, currently the city is being strategically screwed up in the name of development. And alas, one must bear with this infrastructure torture for some more time until either they run out of any more ideas, or until they come with something more ingenious and decide to undo what they did in the first place.

The entire museum road stretch is now screwed up and this is causing atleast an additional 10 minutes to cross up this stretch by car every morning.

I did think, perhaps its atleast easier to come back home via the Palace Road stretch, but thanks to the great Airtel Championship Trophy Cricket, the entire cubbon road, mg road and surrounding stretches are completely screwed up during evenings. Manual signal handling only means more delays, and I now reach home atleast half hour to one hour more than usual. I think seamlessness is still a far fetched goal for Bangalore to achieve. The thought of avoiding a drive inside the city and using the ring road was saner, until the government decided to put a spoke in many a wheel there too. Two new flyovers which must statistically be over in six months from now, are hogging everyone’s time as I found out the hard way round.

Took a bus from North Bangalore at 6:15pm and reached HSR layout at 8pm. Reached koramangala at 9:30pm. Need I speak more? Add to this the entire 27th Main in HSR now serves dust and dirt on your face at any time of the day, with haphazard parking here and there. Makes me wonder why people still dont realize that a good walk for shopping or eating upto 1km does make wonderful sense rather than zipping by your cars. People please stop driving your cars for such small distances. If you think you cannot walk even less than a kilometre, then you perhaps cant eat too much either! Think twice!!

A month of two of ridiculous driving timings, has taken the toll on my free time. Sometimes I think buying a smaller laptop might help me atleast blog more regularly as I can lug it around more than usual! 🙂

If you a regular at the Manyata Business Park in north bengaluru, you would know how irritating it can get to have the same food for years together with the fact that it also degrades over time. Once in a while our palates need a different kind of treatment and for those in this business park, they know that the hotels around are hardly worth a mention.

This is when the first of them, MTR started up at Esteem Mall a good 4km away from the park. While the food here was really good, it used to come in from the center of the city every day. Also, the thought of traveling 4kms for some good food was not a great proposition on a day to day basis. Also, this is not like other restaurants and its more of a self service type of stuff. Though nowadays they have realized that lazy bums like us need help even to get ourselves food and for some tips, do this for you. MTR is a pretty small place and serves you some hot and nice karnataka dishes such as dosas, idlis, meals, all baths (including yours truly – chowchowbath!) and a variety of juices and ice creams and some sweets. If you are not on time the place could get filled up and leave you embarassed after having traveled 4kms.

Today I had the opportunity to visit the food court within Manyata, a really huge place for the ‘inmates’ of the complex if I may say so! 🙂 Its a good ten minutes walk away in the scorching sun thanks to no trees around (the crorepati’s of SEZs must have thought better). Past the IBM compex on the first floor is a food court that hides it size until you get in. You are greeted by no less than 3 ATM kiosks, some 20 odd shops all around and lets just say thousands of chairs in the large enclosure. No matter what these chairs never get filled at any point!

The lifts are at the middle of the hall and present a nice touch to the whole construction. The AC ducts are by and large bare and visible, but who cares! The food is on the expensive side, but definitely tasty to say the least. Nice Punjabi food, Andhra meals, Baskin Robbins ice creams, Chung wah from china, and Ruchi Sagar from our own city – these in essence act as attraction points within the court.

The wash rooms are decent, the cleaners present themselves in uniform, place is kept tidy all the time and at a corner is a feedback book in case you care about telling something to someone. To sum up, a great place to go, say once in a month, and indulge your heart and stomach out 🙂

While I was wondering how different it is from the usual 500 series of buses (volvo and non volvo) that loiter around the ORR, I could only imagine that this Big 10 Circle might actually link all those roads where the other Big 10’s would intersect at. So now, I can always take a Big 10 to enter the city, and exit the city with yet another one, and just in case I decide I need a circular detour, can pick up where I left on Big 10 Circle. More information on Big 10 circle is available here.

So the link says 500 series is to go and about 200 odd Big 10 circle buses to operate. Now thats quite a lot, and one can expect a Big 10 circle bus every something like 10 minutes at this case. 200 buses on a 77km road mean something like 1 bus every kilometer at any point? Wow those figures will surely do a great deal of good.

But one last thing. I can get down from a Big 10 at Mayo Hall, but to catch an outgoing Big 10 towards north Bangalore, I would have to catch another at Shivajinagar. And hey people at BMTC dont be dumb to assume everyone can walk that distance. I request BMTC to please please move the buses coming in to shivajinagar further to Mayo Hall to just give that desperately needed connection which would make Big 10 a success Story.

Ok then, looking forward to a Big 10 Circle in front of my office every 10 minutes! 🙂

Technorati Tags: bangalore, bengaluru, south, north, big 10 circle, buses, bmtc, big 10, ring road, orr, prr, 200, 500, karnataka, blog, automobiles, buses, traffic

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