I stay in Gurgaon. Though I agree that there are no places here to hangout on the weekends except the malls and there is a lot of dust in the city but still I find Gurgaon a great place to stay. Well the reason for this (according to me) is the wide roads. There is no traffic congestion anywhere and even in the city I can easily get to top speeds of 80-90 kmph. Yeah I know its weird but I judge a city by its traffic.
Hoshing and I (the budding Joe Satriani and Jimi Hendrix respectively) wanted to buy a guitar. We inquired about some guitars in Gurgaon and seeing the exhorbitant prices we decided to buy it from Daryaganj (an area in New Delhi). I have been living in Gurgaon for over 20 months now and if I ever have to go to Delhi I get lost as soon as I cross Dhaula Kuan (Delhi-Gurgaon border). Hoshing said that he knows the way around Delhi and we can go ahead without a prinout of the Google Maps (Gullible me :( ). Okay, so we started our journey from Gurgaon to Delhi on the beautiful NH-8. As expected, we lost our way after Dhaula Kuan (DK). We kept asking our way to Daryaganj from every Tom, Dick and Harry on the road and it took us 1 hour and 45 minutes from DK to Daryaganj.
I thought Sheila Dikshit had done a wonderful job on the infrastructure in Delhi. Alas, I was mistaken. There are very few direction boards in the city. There is no way that a newbie can move around the city without getting lost atleast a dozen times. The quality of roads continues to be pathetic. There were bumps and ditches everywhere. Also, at some places (near the Red Fort) the roads were so narrow that it took me freaking 30 minutes to complete a 200m stretch of road. People say they love the small houses and narrow roads in Delhi. I ask them - do you love staying under-developed? I think Delhi has to come up by leaps and bounds if it is to come even close to being a world-class city.
After 5 hours (out of which only 45 minutes were spent on purchasing the guitars) Joe and Jimi returned home. The thing that made it even more awesome was the Delhi two-wheelers. They have an amazing traffic sense and will overtake car your car from every which way. Another thing that is great is the precision with which they drive their bikes. Mostly they were just a few centimetres from my car. Who cares if you occassionaly touch a car and put a small scratch right? At one point midway, my lossy body had almost given up, but I still decided to labour on. I was so tired that I could not even post this blog yesterday!! However the trip was not a total waste. I learnt some valuable lessons:
- Never go to the interior Delhi in your own car
- Only go to Delhi if you are going to get a discount of 25% or more (we both got cool guitars at prices 25% less than those in Gurgaon :) ), otherwise it is not worth it
- Never trust Hoshing and his sense of direction
3 comments:
Interesting :) .. U do write decentky well I must say.. with adequate humor :P
Hmmmmm.... point number 3 is the best learning I feel ...... And hope you will stick to it :P
Sunny
WE are too happy to read your blog whcih is improving with each passing day. Keep it up.
Mumma & Papa
Post a Comment