40 Express. Review on BEST - PSUs

PS: Do not treat this as a product review. This is someone’s personal feeling about one particular route of BEST. I am putting forward his words over here on MS. Enjoy

That EPC project(undisclosed) is definitely a feather in the hat of my company considering the sheer scale of the project. Complete engineering of this project was being done at Kalina, Mumbai. It was an honor for me to be a part of such a gigantic project, this being my first job. From talking about my monthly allowance in thousands while in college to dealing in orders worth crores is a big leap. However, this article is not about those technical intricacies or management strategies of the project. Read on to find out more…

Most of the engineers working on this project were usually put up in guest-houses in Borivali. For those less informed, it is a suburb of suburbs of Mumbai, famous for a national park, which in turn is famous for its notorious cats that have been wreaking havoc in the nearby civilization, especially guest-houses. Had it been slightly north of where it is right now, Mars would have been closer to Kalina. The quickest means of travel – local trains, provided you manage to board one, is not actually the quickest if you count the collaterals like the time from guest-house to Borivali station, crossing the bridge from platform 6 to 1 at Santa Cruz station and from the station to Kalina. The best trade-off between comfort, economy and travel-time is our beloved bus – the 40 EXPRESS.

Relatively new to Mumbai, I would always look for direct buses like the 449 because changing buses would mean wastage of time. So I thought.  My colleagues introduced me to 40 EXPRESS. Thus began a romance.

The good thing about the 40 EXPRESS is that it plies at an interval of just 20 minutes. The not so good thing is that I usually tend to miss the one I intend to catch. It starts from a bus stop very near to the guest-house and takes you to a point very near to a bus stop where you can catch another bus to Kalina.

Even though the bus stop is only the second one from the place of origin of the bus, it arrives packed with people, mostly males, who were sent by God Almighty to make the life of we engineers’ worse. Since I did not expect to get a seat on boarding the bus, I was usually the last one at the bus stop to board it. A few days later, I picked up the acrobatic skill of boarding a decelerating bus, thanks to one of my colleagues, and thus brightened the chances of getting a seat. That made life simpler till the next stop where I would gracefully get up and offer my seat to the ladies. Soon enough I realized that those seats that I usually vacated for the ladies were meant for the ladies. I did not have the choice of vacating it and had to simply oblige like other people in my position. So much for chivalry!

Off we went from one stop to another like Orangutans dangling from the branch of a vibrating tree that a hunter was trying to cut down with the most sophisticated cutter hoping to savor some Orangutan meat for dinner. In the course of time, I mastered the art of extracting the exact fare from my wallet with one hand while holding on to the bus bar with the other. I would usually wish for a third hand to take care of my office bag and a fourth one to hold the newspaper. That basically means that my colleague and I, combined, would have been an octopus had Mumbai been a sea. Forget the last line.

As we continued our journey over bridges and nallahs, the bus began overflowing with people. I always thought that the entire Mumbai junta was trying to take their revenge on me and wanted to board the same bus I was traveling on. Surprisingly, the whole idea of boarding an already packed bus seemed very funny to a few people and they would just not contain their catcalls. The conductor, in answer, would not stop reprimanding them even though it wouldn’t earn him an extra buck. The ladies would not stop raising objections to any unfamiliar touch in their sharp and shrill voices. In short, there was complete mayhem all around. Add to that the rain and it would take me another article to elaborate.

In such an airtight environment, fights were bound to erupt, especially when the driver pressed the brake-pedal. The passengers would be like falling bicycles in a bicycle stand where one was enough to set a chain reaction going. Nearly 40 minutes later, as our destination neared, which meant being 2 km away from it, we would slither our way to the exit like snakes. We hopped off the bus and thus, an adventurous and sometimes not-so-adventurous journey came to an end.

In the evenings, 40 EXPRESS was not the same as it was in the mornings and the journey would usually be quite uneventful. If there were any events, I was too tired to notice them.

I look back to my days in Mumbai only to realize that the experience was truly an enriching one. It was on this Mumbai bus that I saw social, economic and religious equality(ref. The Constitution of India) in action. One had to vacate the LADIES seat irrespective of whether one is an engineer or a peon, a Hindu or a Muslim. To occupy a seat, you had to be smart enough to stand at a strategic position and keep your fingers crossed.  ‘Worldly wisdom’ or ‘street smartness’, I think, would be the right words to summarize what I gained.

Now, I make a peaceful 10-minute scooter-ride to office with only a little resistance from the cattle on the roads. I have no 40 EXPRESS to catch here. Pardon the pun, but I really miss the bus.