Drive it with flowers!
Sometimes, the appearance seems to be more important than safety on our roads. I saw several autos, vans and cars bedecked with flowers in this way, on the eve of Bali Padyami. How the drivers of such vehicles can drive safely is beyond me. While such festive displays make for quaint, National-Geographic-type of photography, how is it that the traffic police look the other way when road safety is so blatantly compromised?
The Urban Development Department published the draft Greater Bengaluru Authority (Parking) Rules, 2026 on August 11 and opened it up to the public to give suggestions and file objections. This draft is the legal framework meant to strengthen Bengaluru's Parking Policy 2.0, introduced by the Directorate of Urban Land Transport in Feb 2021. When the parking policy was first brought in, the idea was to discourage the use personal vehicles and free up road space to ensure better mobility. However, the draft rules mostly focus on creating paid on-street parking zones, off-street parking on corporation land, leasing vacant private plots to run…
Imagine the entire population of a small country getting packed beyond capacity in trains so that they can reach their workplace. This is what happens on Mumbai’s suburban railway trains daily. Every day 62 lakh people travel by the Central Railway in Mumbai—that’s almost the entire population of Singapore. Not to be sidetracked, the Western Railway (WR) ferries 31 lakh commuters daily—that's the number of people who live in the whole of Mongolia.It is no surprise that Mumbai’s suburban railway network draws unimaginable crowds. After all, it is one of the most affordable, fastest and well-connected means of transport available…