Ramesh left the office as usual at 6pm.

He has to cross a busy road in front of his Office . Since there was a bus stop in front of the office , lot of commuters will be waiting and more buses stop there , and the road is narrow , the road will be invariably difficult to cross , though not very wide.

He then has to go through a subway under bridge to cross a main road .Then he has to cross foot over bridge above railway tracks .

Even though the railway station is very near , reachable just after crossing the subway and though there was a bus stop in front of his office , he has to invariably go through the process of crossing the main road and then the railway tracks , since the bus towards his house stops there only.

Here again after crossing the railway tracks, a small road has to be crossed . Here since there was a race course and the race crowd used to be there in the evening , it was a bit easy to join the crowd and cross. At this place again , since more buses were plying traffic was more.

The stretch of the bus stop here is about 600 metres. If ten buses come at a time , People may have to run a marathon , to catch the bus , since they may be standing near the last bus and their bus may be the first.

Ramesh decided to stay somewhere near the middle , so that he can move either way towards front or back to catch the bus . But it so happened that no buses were there for sometime and when his bus came , it went straight ahead and he had to move towards the front. Since there was no bus for sometime, the bus stop was crowded and he found it difficult to reach the bus fast. In the mean time , lot of passengers had already got into the bus and the bus was jam packed and ramesh could not get in . He prefers not to stand in the footboard and so avoided getting in and decided to wait.

During the waiting period , he started watching the other commuters. Some were eating samosas from roadside temporary shops. Some took fried groundnuts packed in papers of conical shape and muted them. There were a group of college students who were in no hurry to get into buses and were chitchatting , making fun of each other and also enjoying the snacks viz bajji, bonda etc. There were ladies working in different offices , discussing the day's events. There were some who had made the bus stop as meeting point and waiting for their partners to come and pick them up in two wheeler or cars. There were a few beggars who seeing that the place is crowded trying to make a good collection. Then there was the group from the race course, who were anakysing the day's events and sharing how much they lost or won and about the different horses and the jockeys who participated in the race that day.Then there were the autos who were running on sharing basis to different destinations , trying to get their passengers. Sometimes they were driven away by the police , since they were obstructing the bus movement , by standing in the space meant for the buses to stop. They used to go forward , take a u turn and again trying to make round in the bus stop trying to catch passengers.
When the buses did turn up , it was pathetic to see the elderly and disabled persons being made to run a race to get into the bus, as nobody could predict , when the bus will come and when it comes , where it will stop.

Ramesh finally got the bus for his home and that too could get into the interior of the bus, since his calculations worked out and he got the bus , by being near where it stopped and since he was almost the first to enter , could move inside.

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budding writer from a metro