driving through city streets

Microbuses are indispensable sore vehicles that hog the KTM streets today. They are leaps ahead of Vikram tempos (which are both inefficient and polluting). They easily dominate the poor EV-vehicles who have grown weary of pointing out to the Nepali mass that their pollution is more palatable (which is to say that their pollution- dumping of acids and batteries- are done with stealth and therefore is of no concern to KTM-basi's).

Everyday, the micro drivers take to the city streets with an objective of demonstrating that vehicles are capable of lunging, darting, performing hair-raising acrobatics, and shuttling through impossibly narrow intervehicular spaces . Yet they are preferred by the passengers. They are filthily faster than any public transport, and are dirt cheap. They also service many places which were previously quite inaccessible.If impatience is your thing, ride this baby and you will get to your place in no time, be it bhaktapur, dhulikhel, or manakamana.Together with the package comes the audio supplement of various folk music with sufficiently audible volume that is sure to reach the eardrums of every passenger. Furthermore, they demonstrate the 'more car per car' tagline with a 'leave no man/woman behind' policy; the tagline of MBs should rather be 'there's always a room for more'. hence, an average passenger gets to enjoy the sonic battery as well as olfactory stimulation of body aroma of fellow passengers.

The worst repercussion is that these white raiders hog the street spaces, hence my newly coined term- space pollution. The drivers are so nonchalant that they 1) fail to acknowledge the presence of a policeman standing about a feet away, desperately trying to get attention of the driver, 2) manage to chat with other micro-drivers on trivias, or openly ogle at/harass female pedestrians, and 3) use the side lights and mirrors only for fun.

Micros still have a staunch rival- the maruti taxicabs- who are, in fact, more competent in street maneuvers. strapped with suzuki engines, these tiny wonders are seen cruising around everywhere. if microbuses are called micros, then by logic, these can be called microcars (MCs), that they are! . the drivers of these MCs are astute to realize that parking in the 'sanotino' intersections allow them a better probability of catching hold of their passengers, because they are now 'visible' to more number of roads. The day I realized this, I was so amazed by their brilliance that I stopped cursing them on cluttering the intersections and increasing penchant for traffic mishaps, especially when I had to maneuver my car around them. I have taken taxis at such strategic locations as granted- even when i see just feet of a dozing driver behind the wheel, or the fully-unfolded newspaper engulfing the whole space inside the MC, i just marvel at their game plans.

I have developed a theorem: Ceteris paribus, anyone riding a particular vehicle type develops a special loathing for all the other vehicle types infesting the city streets.This is a demonstrable truth. Take A, for example, who is driving a car. He hates it when the kamikaze bikers (the sizes of whose bikes grow by every new introduction of models) zoom past cars at breakneck speeds, especially in crowded streets. The hatred arises from many sources: 1) bike has the advantage of getting through traffic much faster than cars 2) bikers have tendencies of recklessness- inflicting lateral scratches and ear-tweakings (bendings of the side mirrors). They also perform treacherous dips just ahead of cars during their weaving among the street lanes, forcing the car driver to cautiously monitor an area of about 3 feet around the car.

Bikers hate cars just because they seem so bulky, and seem to be causing the traffic slowdowns. (they usually silently volunteer to veer forward seemingly towards the epicenter of the traffic block, some even performing as ad-hoc traffic monitors signaling the oncoming traffic). Microbuses hate the eco-friendlies because they are slow and unacrobatic. They get hated in return for bullying through the traffic.

An important lemma to this theorem is that every vehicle type thinks that it is the king of the road, and the rest are useless space polluters.