Column

What fun. Now that the Bandra-Worli sealink is almost ready and the celebrities have seen it (it is a truth universally acknowledged that no bridge can be ready for public use unless some celebrities are seen to have seen it), we are told that the bridge will cause massive traffic jams at Worli.

Yes. To those of us who use Mumbai’s roads, that was a given. For those of us who live in Malabar Hill and work in Nariman Point, we may not have figured this out because we only meet the mess from Haji Ali onwards when we go to the airport.

And since many of us drive red-topped cars, someone clears the mess before we get there. So how on earth were we to know about this enormous daily jam at Haji Ali that can only get cleared when we build the rest of the freeway all the way to Nariman Point?

Should the rest of us point out that this freeway has been 10 years in the making? That every meeting of activists and citizens that has been held has pointed out that unless what-to-do-with-Worli has been sorted out, the gains made on the freeway will soon be lost? Naah, we should not be so ungracious.

The fact is that the freeway is a generous gift which the government is giving us and we must be grateful. We must be happy that we have this world class freeway across the sea and we mustn’t grumble about small things like is it useful or not. We can take our families up and down it (without ever going to Worli and Haji Ali), we can have picnics on it, we can shoot the breeze if we have no families and stuff. But we must now all decide to love it.

About 100 years from now, when the freeway is connected all the way to Nariman Point, via an undersea and ground tunnel from Priyadarshini Park to Chowpatty to re-merge without spoiling the view of the Chhatrapati Shivaji statue that may well be there by then, our great grandchildren who may well have run out of fossil fuels and will be going to work on bullock carts will thank our foresight. Often, you see, death is a blessing.

Pick of the week
Without wanting to sound like those people, please please please can our advertisers write their Hindi/Hinglish words in the Devnagri script? I just can’t get it in English and all their cleverness is wasted on me.

The other day I was flummoxed by a hoarding from a music channel which talked about someone mad panties. What does this mean? When you get your knickers in a twist? When you lose your mind because of an overuse of thongs? When a monkey steals your husband’s underpants? See? I’m needlessly confused.
b_ranjona@dnaindia.net