Tar Untar – When is this going to change?

No, I’m not talking about tar and untar archiving utilities in linux here, but referring to asphalting of roads.

I went home on Friday night and could see that the main road (Vatal Nagraj Road) adjoining our street was being repaired and it was almost done. The next day, the work was completed and the roads looked awesome and it felt really good to drive on them. After all, the roads were being repaired for the first time after 5-6 years!

Come Monday, and I leave for college early in the morning around 7.30 and I already find some people digging the sides of the road. When I went up to them asked what they were digging for, they said there was a problem with the telephone cables and they are laying new ones.

I couldn’t stop but calculate the life-time of the new road and I found that it was a whopping 2 days! And the amount of money that would have got wasted for these 2 days is overwhelmingly high. I did not want to think about the wastage of resources, time and money any more as I do a lot of it myself. I just thought how it could have been avoided. Had the two concerned authorities worked with some co-ordination, the life-time of the new road would have been at least 5-6 years instead of just 2 days. That is a 10,000% increase in the life-time (yes, if you don’t believe it, go and calculate) and the money spent on it would have been totally worth it. And the communication cost between the two companies would have been negligible. After all, it all gets down to the tax-payers, why do we have to care?

Garib Rath–kudos to Laloo

I wanted to go home really badly, not because I was away from a long time, but I was really getting bugged with the same routine of lab to room and back to lab in IIIT and the amount of work that I thought I was doing looked too much (thought it was not much). And thinking of the life at our college (NIT Durgapur) and the whole idea of me working in the vacations too, made me feel even more sick! I just needed a break. So I wanted to book my train ticket and started searching for trains. I then got to know about the Garib Rath, which plies between Hyderabad and Bangalore. So I decided to try it once and booked my tickets. To my surprise, the AC 3 tier ticket cost just Rs. 499, from Hyderabad to Bangalore!

The train is very new and well maintained, it’s worth more than 500 bucks surely. I enjoyed the journey and traveled in the same train twice more. Each coach has 78 berths. It’s just like a normal train, but there is a side middle berth also and that’s how they earn some extra money. But that is totally acceptable and even then it’s worth it to travel in that. I had a very good experience and hope that more such trains in many more routes will be started.

Cheers Laloo!