Typical weekday traffic during the peak hours 8-11 in morning and 5-8 in the evening in Bangalore is normally bumper to bumper and if you are driving a four wheeler you may not need to change gears and stick to the first one itself. I take outer ring road which has become congested even after so many flyovers constructed in last four-five years but probably due to burgeoning IT companies on this road as well a many apartment complexes the increase in traffic has outstripped the infrastructure hands down.

Anyways there are lots of ill effects of the traffic be it from loss of productivity of employees, stress levels going up, noise, pollution and so many others. There are couple of things that I draw from the traffic that I see daily. I think that it helps you develop patience or at least increases your patience. There isn’t much you can do when you are stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. Initially it may irritate you, the stress levels can go up but eventually you have to calm down and get your patience level better. There are people who still try to sneak in, go that extra inch and honk incessantly especially the taxis and cab. But think of  people whose job is to be on the roads and then probably reduces your pain.

There is one more lesson of life that you can get from this traffic. Sometimes when for some reason on a weekday I see somewhat free traffic it comes to my mind that somewhere someone is stuck and therefore I see the road somewhat free. So its a zero sum game where someone’s gain is actually someone’s loss. Isn’t that true for many things in our life?

Anyways there can be more learnings from these small situations that life puts us into. But one thing for sure is that the meaning of development in terms of flyovers, skyscrapers, per capita cars or income isn’t the only thing we need to look for, we also need to look for reducing the basic day to day pains which is quite common and everyone seems to just take it as fate and live.