Saturday 22 June 2019

Buffoonery Omnibus

The recent viral video of college students sitting on the roof of a Chennai city bus and tumbling down when the driver applied sudden brakes, really sums up the city's youthscape. One can find boisterousness among youthful commuters in all the cities, but Chennai takes the cake.

With hardly any pubs and other recreational places to hang out, and Tamil cinema promoting stalking on an industrial scale, for most college students in Chennai, the city bus is a mobile vanity fair - the big stage to display their physical agility and singing abilities to impress women passengers. These guys will hang on to the footboards of the wider middle door of the buses, even if seats inside are empty, and sing latest Tamil chartbusters.

At every bus stop, they will alight and then allow the bus to move a little and then make a dash to get a toehold on the footboard. An exemplary camaraderie exists within these gangs. They will lend a helping hand if someone among them is finding it difficult to make it to the footboard after the bus leaves a stop. 

During my stay in Chennai, I often used to meet these boisterous groups while on my way to the office in the afternoons. They would board from stops near Pachayappas college, an institution of 1842 vintage, but well past its glory days. It counts noted Mathematician Ramanujam among its alumni, but somewhere down the line, it lost its plot. A few decades ago it earned the sobriquet 'rowdy factory' and now it is engraved in stone.

The songs are often accompanied by thumping of bus body, and they get shrill when the bus reaches women's colleges like Ethiraj or Women's Christian College.

Quite often their attempts to daredevilry of jumping into a moving bus used to end up as damp squibs. Once as the bus left a stop a guy started sprinting towards it, but to his dismay, a lamp post came on his way and he was forced to slow down. By then the bus sped away, leaving him to fret over his tough luck.

In another instance, a guy nearly got into the bus after his sprint but his slippery fingers gave way and he fell off. As the bus was not moving fast the impact of the fall was not that strong.

As the bus moved on I peered through the window and saw him spring back on his feet in a jiffy. As this happened in the month of May - the 'high noon' of Agni Natchathiram, Chennai was at its searing best with the tar on the road close to the melting point. So probably for him, it may have seemed like landing on molten lava and hence he got up quite unmindful of his pain!

Needless to say, they were a perpetual nuisance for other commuters, especially while boarding and alighting. And I often used to wonder what type of woman gets impressed by such buffoonery!

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