My Small Town… Bhubaneswar – I
Filed under: Down the memory lane... — chapters @ 8:00 PM
Have you ever been to Bhubaneswar (Capital of Orissa and well-known as The Temple City) ? I am born and brought up there. I had spent around 22/23 years there. It used to be a not-so-metro-like city. These days, with the help of few IT companies, it is grooming. But I am not going to talk about those IT companies and the impact on Bhubaneswar. I just want to tell that, my city, Bhubaneswar has emerged like a beautiful place recently. Within last 2 years, I have marked the change… asif the whole city is celebrating beauty. The roads are smooth and clean, the road side walls are full of hand painted pictures… The next time I go, I will click some pictures and post them on my blog. Much of the street vendors are given a vending zone by the BMC (Bhuabaneswar Municipal Corporation), which is parallel to the street but away from it. This avoids the un-necessary crowd on the roads.
This time, a new traffic rule has been activated… helmets for both riders of the 2-wheelers. Unlike the metros, people in small towns use more 2-wheelers. The streets are full of bikes, scooties, scooters… Most of the families (let’s say the lower middle class families, which adds most to the population of a small town like BBSR) have as many 2-wheelers as the family members. Scooty is considered as an ideal gift for the girl of the family who cleared the class 10th exam successfully, and a bike serves the same purpose for a boy.
So you can well imagine a typical busy BBSRian road and most of the accidents are actually very severe. Lots of people get fatal injuries due to the lack of basic interest in their safety… They know that wearing helmets can save their lives. But still people avoid it god knows why!!! I don’t understand why people wait till Government makes a rule. The traffic police does not lose something if you don’t wear a helmet. It is you who will lose. Even I heard few complaining about the rule. Whatever, atleast due to this rule people are wearing helmets these days. Actually not for the sake of the rule, they wear helmets just to avoid the fines 
Anyways, some rules (read fines) are making our road trips little safetier in BBSR.
… To be continued.
