KAHIHI

Hinjewadi, a large land mass made of farms, hillocks, mountains, and greenery all around, has witnessed staggering growth in last 6-7 years. The property prices have gone up 300 times. A farmer at one time who hailed his bullock cart as his pride, today drives Boleros, Scorpios, Fords – plurals because a single farmer owns and has the capacity to maintain multiple vehicles. The only greenery or the green shades you can see today are the green paints, if at all used, on the exteriors of the constructions that have sprouted like a swarm of locust on the same farmlands.

Jai Ho IT, Information Technology or simply said Software, Computers et al.

Hinjewadi and the surrounding areas are now thickly populated with IT professionals, an elite mass enjoying the pride that banking professionals enjoyed once upon a time. By elite I mean, one who doesn’t care how much is spent and being ignorant of the fact that they are the biggest contributors to the prevailing inflation, at least in Hinjewadi and surrounding areas – one kg of tomato in a near remote area costs Rs. X, the same will cost Rs. X+2 in an area where IT professionals reside; just because vendors think IT guys are rich, and also because IT guys don’t bargain, it’s against their pride to negotiate.

Yes, it does sound foolish.

While this habit of IT professionals does agitate me, I might still pardon them for negotiation is skill, and not everyone can master it. However, what stirs me up ecstatically is that these professionals who pledge to work “for the logic”, “by the logic”, many a times go “off the logic”.

Once a beautiful, peaceful pensioner’s paradise has now turned into a mess full of traffic, pollution. While the advent of IT in Pune has kept India shinning, the residents of are left whining. I have heard many lament about “amchya velela hey asa nhavta” (it wasn’t like this during our times). I will explain.

Reaching Hinjewadi IT Park requires you to cross a bridge, if you are coming from Wakad or Aundh. That the traffic chokes at the ends of the bridge requires no logic to understand. Also it is exciting and despicable of course to see that a bridge has been built perpendicular to the Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore highway, imagine there is a signal on a national highway. I don’t understand which engineer’s (again a class that takes pride in being logic and calculations maestro) analysis and implementation that is.

Now these IT guys flock to office in the morning and are rushing home in the evening. Everyone is in a hurry. Thus begins overtaking. Bikers are experts in this (Pune has also been known for its two wheeler population), they don’t leave a narrowest gap in which they don’t creep in, perhaps they can even ride their two wheelers on Shilpa Shetty’s curvy narrow waist. In the angst and the quest to find gaps, each one tries to get into the opposite lane thus blocking the traffic coming from opposite direction. A long serpentine queue progresses then on their side. It gets real chaotic on the middle of the bridge from where neither can you take a U turn nor can you jump off the bridge. In the haste to save few minutes, hours are wasted in that traffic congestion. But nobody understands this logic. No one wants to follow the traffic rules or the lane discipline. And all this by the same IT professionals who when in foreign countries (onsite) follow minutest of the rule. However, as soon as they land in India, discipline shreds off, logic is dumped in the trash bin, and hypocrisy creeps in.

“Oh it’s so pathetic in India. Go and see in that country, how everything is perfect, no traffic, no pollution,” they crib sitting in the car on the same bridge on which they had once tried to overtake and now are spitting out gargles of Bisleri water.