Re-Route
I sat in the low floor DTC bus as usual on my way home from college. It was a 40 min ride from home with an interchange at south ex. Luckily today I got on the other one so I would not be needing to get down at south ex, nor cross roads unnecessarily since this one was a youth special. A rare fleet of buses exclusively for college going women. Seeing the overall scanty occupancy I decided to plug in my headphones and listen to some music on my way, when I realized my headphones battery died. This is where the fun part began.
I could overhear another girl in front of me cribbing about how long it took for her to reach college from her home, which was practically less than 10km from the college. Unfortunately this lovely lady being tech savvy had decided to follow the google maps route for public transport inch by inch without ever bothering to check the map for the best routes available. So her ordeal was a rather long one, she started from her home to the nearest metro station, a 15 min. Auto ride. Followed by boarding the metro which would take her to the nearest interchange station situated all the way into the heart of the city,taking approximately 20 min. from where she would travel back all the way back to the nearest metro station from the college campus that would take another 30 min. Delhi university south campus being a scattered university campus with colleges everywhere, she again had to take another sharing auto ride for 10 min. After which she can walk to her college campus. All this while, she could have taken an auto ride for 20 min. And reached her destination without hassle. Having spent a frustratingly long while travelling she had decided to take the bus now to the nearest metro station all over again. As she was detailing her perilous journey to someone on the phone I could not help but suppress laughter with pity. It seriously was much ado about nothing.
Apparently the auto driver who dropped her to the metro station had asked her where she wanted to go and tried to reason that he could drop her. Unfortunately, she thought the poor guy would be trying to scam her and chose to follow the map religiously. I do not blame her entirely for her skepticism, the world is a scary space for young women trying to travel alone in the metro city especially if you read the daily news. But I can not help wonder how much distrust we put in people earning bare minimum wages? Or how sorry the state of this world is that women have to overthink to the extent of futile travel just for the sake of feeling secure. If only we humans learnt to keep aside our ego and actually checked around for directions better. After all, we are all trying to get by this journey called life and a little bit of faith in one another is all that we need to restore the amazing wonder called humanity.
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