Waiting patiently on my scooter – smack in the middle of a jam – for the traffic light to turn green at the Old Madras – CV Raman Nagar junction today, I was hit from behind by a TATA Sumo ferrying BPO employees. Okay, perhaps thats an exagerration. I was nudged from behind. Still, it was sufficient to give a rude shock. Any harder and I would have fallen over backwards, onto the main road.

On turning around, all I could see was the driver from behind his wheel, wearing a nonchalant expression and offering neither an explanation nor an apology.

Never in the 2 weeks of coming back to Bangalore did I feel such fury as I did today. Had the children been on the scooter, things would have perhaps taken a turn for the worse. Fury would have turned into violence.

And so, reading this story today, I can perfectly understand the poser in Deccan Herald’s story on the same:

Bangalore may have grown from being a Garden City to the Silicon Valley of India over the decades. But whatever happened to its heart during this transition??

The fact of the matter is that people have just turned heartless. Its something like the recent story about 41 odd climbers passing by a stranded & dying climber on Mount Everest without stopping by to help.

If it’s not the lucre of money, then it’s the hunger to make a name. One’s success is being measured today by the number of cars, loans, flashy handphones etc that one possesses….everything else is relegated to the background. While times have changed, it also seems to have turned itself into short supply. A day passes by in a blur.

So why should anyone in their right minds want to stop and help poor Kayia Florence, stuck under the wheel of a bus, as it tried to roll on by?

:(