#keyrun

There is an old saying in Zagreb - “Jab geedad ki maut aati hai, toh woh shehar ki taraf bhaagta hai.”

Loosely translated it means, when you feel happy, content & have a song on your lips and bounce in your steps, you hit the road to make your life miserable once again. Despite the fat pay cheques, plush offices, sexy secretaries et al, the one thing people with regular day jobs envy the rookie freelancers for is the fact that despite the wretched lives, cheap booze, Four Square cigarettes & not getting annoying calls from credit card companies, freelancers don’t have to commute to work every day of their lives. Well almost.

Over the past few years, all roads lead to miseries of all kinds, many times leading to death or near death situations. The roads have become the one single place where joy goes to die. Before modern day civilization became popular, the roads were a happy place to be at – a place where you bump into old friends and family, buy things that you need or don’t need and finally lumber back home drunk. But things have changed so badly, that I have stopped stepping out of my home if not for a life changing emergency – like perhaps running out of cigarettes or Old Monk.  At times both of them simultaneously. Shudder!

I have (happily or otherwise) missed out on attending countless weddings, birthday parties, baby showers, funerals, thread ceremonies, anniversaries or any such outing that doesn’t involve me getting punch drunk or watching a good film in the darkness of a theatre. That has been my life so far. So much so that I gave up my day job, so that I don’t need to travel on a daily basis. That’s how paranoid I have become of getting out on the roads. I feel like punching the guy in the colons, who said, “All roads lead to Rome.” Come to Bombay, you moron, all roads either lead to Saki Naka or worse still, the notorious Juhu Circle.

Before you all pounce on me with, “Bro, but Worli Sea Link...”, let me remind you – I am a poor-as-a-church-mouse freelancer, and I am not even getting paid to write this shit. (Somebody might buy me a round of Old Monk at Janata, but that doesn’t count as remuneration, so kindly bugger off). Anyways, I recently came to know of this new revolution that is going to hit the roads and will perhaps change the way I have felt about hitting the road all these years.

The phenomenon was initiated by Autocar India (the magazine) and Maruti (the car guys), a few years back, known as the Young Driver Contest. Perhaps for the lack of knowing any better, the campaign went unnoticed all this while. But this year, those nice people seem to have woken up to the beast that social media has become, and are going all guns blazing with their campaign which has already been initiated on various online platforms. The campaign has been kick-started with a video that has gone viral, called the ‘Blame Game’ or something to that effect. I am too sober to remember what it was, so sorry.

After this little nutty video, the main campaign will roll out and the end result will be that there will be a bunch of young people who will drive well (not cuss, honk, jump signals or cut lanes) and help bring back the much needed sanity on the roads. At least I hope they will help, but screw cynicism for now. The request I have for you (if you have managed to read this far without passing out or throwing up or finished watching Ashutosh Gowariker’s epic Jodha Akbar thrice) is that please watch the video that we have embedded below, share the living daylights out of it on Twitter, FB and what-have-you, crash the Youtube servers with unheard of hits, like those of Justin Bieber’s sweet womits, baby.

If you do that, I will pray that you never get stuck at Saki Naka or Juhu Circle. If the sponsors are generous enough, for all you know, they might even gift you a brand new car. But that is too much optimism for me to handle. Kind people, please do it for getting the sanity back on the roads like the good ol’ days. We owe it for the future generation. And for starters, stop honking. It makes you look like a retard and angers me so much that I will not even attend my own funeral if it entails any kind of travelling. There I said it. Now watch the video or I will come and honk you in your dreams.

P.S.: I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the nice people at FolksVagn, who are already doing their bit to keep roads a little saner with their amazing car-pooling service. Join their site, download their app, save money, save time, earn karma points & perhaps gift me a Hummer and a small island near Bora Bora. Now that would be nice.

Aapki sewa mein, jan hit mein jaari: Don’t drive drunk. You’ll die.

Okay, bye.

 Aila! That rhymed! Occupational hazard, you see.