Ranting and raving..

Nowadays, whenever faced with a difficult situation, I laugh. Not the forced-nervous Dr. J Asthana kind of laughter. Real bubbling laughter. Noisy aunty elbowing me out of the way to get into the local, I laugh. Students cutting across the line to get food before me, I laugh. I've genuinely started laughing in circumstances that would otherwise make me hopping mad. However, Shivneri just took away my calm. I was ready to burn down the entire Shivneri bus stand, not before stoning down a few buses.

I'd bought the ticket for 6:15 pm asiad. The boarding point was Swargate. Till 7:00 pm, there was no sign of the bus. The officials refused to tell us where it was and when it would come. Finally, we decided to cancel the ticket. It took us fifteen minutes, just to find the person who would give us our complete refund. He had the audacity to go and check whether the bus had really not come. I mean, come on! There should be some compensation for a bus that is an hour late! After filling out some form, he sent us towards the cash counter which was safely tucked away in one corner of that damned big maze called the Asiad bus depo.

It took us about forty five minutes to get our refund. I then booked a ticket for the next day 6:00 am. As usual, the bus came at 6:25 am. At 9:45, the driver asked all the passengers going to Mumbai Central to get down and sit in an ST he had flagged down. Reason? The bus had broken down. Somehow, the bus magically repaired itself and the driver dropped off the remaining passengers at Dadar. I mean, what the f!! Just because they were too lazy to drive the bus beyond Dadar, they shipped off the passengers to another bus! Worse, the bus drove right past where it would have been convenient for me to get down but the driver refused to stop there. They could waste 10 mins shuttling passengers from 1 bus to the other, but couldn't stop 2 mins away from their designated bus stop.

Insensitivity is a word we've all come to associate with government workers. For some reason, I thought Shivneri is more reliable. This incident just proves how wrong I was. I've sworn to myself, I'll never ever travel by Shivneri again. Damned nonsense!