Bangalore Weekender

Bangalore features as "Best place to Live" in every possible ranking in the world. If you took the base Excel sheets made by those journos and chose to un-hide Rows between the title and number one ranked city you'll find Bangalore in there.

Let me take you through a typical weekend trip to a movie and dinner and you'll probably quit your job, sell off your family properties, board the next flight and come to Bangalore.

1. Autowalas

In geometry my teacher taught me that the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line. What he forgot to add was that the longest distance between any two points is what a Bangalore Autowala will show you. And to add salt to injury after they take you round and round the city, they round off the fare to the next multiple to 10 !

Imagine a Mahabharat-era setting, you the noble prince command your sarathi to take you to the nearing kingdom and he tells you "Meter se Rs. 20 extra lagega" ! Guaranteed WTF.

They follow a very flexible timing policy. The One and half starts hours before the actual stipulated time and end hours after the actual stipulated time.

2. Unique riding experience

Bangalore offers a riding experience like no other city. They offer the best of all worlds - Mumbai's refreshing congestion, Delhi's musical expletives, Kolkata's magic dust and rural India's energizing potholes.

Those potholes especially are legendary. They are inspired from the ruins of Babylon. The future vision is to host bungee jumping at the 2020 Olympics when wrestling gets the boot. People don't have to travel to far off lands burning hard-earned cash for it. The reason why BMC hasn't approved flying cars in Banaglore is because they haven't figured out how to introduce potholes in the sky.

The roads around Bangalore were probably designed by one of the guys laid off by a Supermarket. It makes you go through unnecessary areas through a careful and well-designed series of one-ways or prohibited turns.

3. Multiplexes

Pirates of the modern era. They use three absolutely convenient slabs for Ticket prices - 'Goodbye Salary', 'Hello highway robbery' and 'Time to sell my Kidney'.

And then they take a deposit for the 3D glasses inconveniencing everyone for change. I mean what good is their security for if people can easily escape the cinemas without returning the glasses. Its equivalent to a fine-dining restaurant taking deposit from you for eating in their cutlery.

For their in-cinema meals rather than putting up all of those MRPs they can simple point a gun and ask the consumer to handover all that he has got. 180 bucks for a burger ! Is Gold dust used for seasoning? And making a bucket load of margin on something as essential as water is plain cruelty.

To top it off they bombard you with so many commercials you need a Interval between commercials and not between the the actual Movie. Maybe someday I have to pay for the commercials and the movie will be free.

4. Restaurants

If the multiplexes didn't cavity search you and take all you got then the Restaurants will. They insist on Reservations even if you were the last two people on the planet. Gone are the days when you could walk into a restaurant. Now it looks the Doctor's office where everybody has an appointment and are waiting their turns.

If they want to fleece you, all they have do is add some designer cut carrots and some beans along with potato mash to a regular meal. From a two digit price menu it got transformed to three digit and four digit price menu.

Well that's only the tip of the iceberg. Now I pay more in taxes than for the blessed meal itself. And who the hell invented Service charge? Have the waiters stopped getting salaries and now live off this Service charge ? Is there a self-service option?

Imagine one goes through all this and the higher mortals still ask why are there two Bharats !