Pune is uncool

Pune is damn expensive.

Sethi aunty started telling me about how the prices of food items have skyrocketed. She told me she bought 3 kg of ladies fingers for 80 rupees, and tomatoes at Rs 30/Kg (I was already wondering of the hidden message, that my dinner tiffin may become dearer soon, and I thought 25 rupees was itself too much!). I could hardly believe my ears, especially as compared to Delhi, you get good food quite cheap. Sethi aunty’s son was telling me how in Delhi you could eat one good meal for Rs 15 while in a day there won’t be a need to shell out more than 50 bucks for three meals. Here, if you order a paneer pasanda in a half-decent restaurant (I am not mentioning a hotel), that would lighten your wallet by 50 rupees, if not more. I had experienced the same thing too; I bought a dozen small oranges (in season time) for 30 rupees. They all turned out sour, and I do have some expertise in handpicking fruits and vegetables. That experience told me I had still some way to go before becoming an expert like my mom, or for that matter, King Solomon's garden bees which knew about the real and the fake flowers.

Not drifting away from the gist of it, why does petrol have to cost the most in Maharashtra, and especially, Pune? On an average, it is 5-6 rupees more than any other state. Even the room I am staying in is for one person only, as I think, but it's supposedly "good enough" for two, and maybe even three to "fit in". I am paying 2000 bucks a month for the accommodation. Isn't it ludicrous, insane, naive idea to pay such an exorbitant amount for living in a closet? Well not so if you consider the distance to my college. If I consider a far-off place like Sangvi, then the cost of petrol would balloon so much that on the whole, it would not be an economical option.

Recently, Pune was voted the no.2 most expensive city in the country. I am not against any particular region, but my logic says that if you are living in an expensive city, then all the services that are provided to you should be of the very highest quality. Well, Pune...oh no! You would be forgiven if you think, “Where have I landed up in this shithole?". The roads are filled with big potholes, capable of giving a minor dislocation of the shoulder or the knee, whose recovery would take only six months...and set you back by any kind of five-figure amount. The doctors would say, “Boy, you got lucky! You just beat the inflation in the pharma market that is expected next month; you are going to save a lot of money!” If you accidentally caught a good road, you would be tempted to think elections are around the corner. Just the indignity of that makes me feel sick and nauseated. The pollution just gets worse and worse. The authorities have the temerity to put up "148" on the pollution meter, right next to the respirable upper limit of 50. The temperatures nowadays makes you wonder if some years back it was really called a Pensioner's Paradise ? The noise is worse than the gaseous fumes you inhale. The fumes can only cause you lung cancer; if you are strong-willed you can fight it, but the deafening noise in the jams would make you go into a state of permanent trauma. In all these years, I don’t know of a single place, open to all the citizens, worth visiting. In Mumbai, you got a lot of parks, maidans, beaches, museums, and places of historical importance. Pune is a shithole, it really has become one. I am glad my college is one one the safe havens, an area under military control. The first time I started to dislike it was the pedestrian walks. Either you would not find one at all, or even if you did, it would be a narrow one, fit only for one person to walk in one direction, and that space too was usurped by hawkers. So the authorities don’t want to give any respect to pedestrians. Pune is uncool.


The water supply, it’s like a geyser but an unfaithful one. The water itself can give you frequent stomach bugs and cause throw-ups. The electricity, intermittent. Sometimes, my stabilizer does not get the necessary potential. It needs at least 230 V, and many times it shows just 190 V, and at this instant my computer is switched off. What you see is not what is expected. My hard disk (40 GB is no more a bully these days, in the times of 100 and 120 GB hard disks. Mine is a poor cousin) has suffered a lot at the hands of the MSEB. But it still holds some of its own; on booting my computer 5 times, it is detected once. Can I file a lawsuit against the supplier for permanently damaging my hard disk? Most of you would just laugh at that...I keep getting nightmares of my CPU bursting in fumes!

When I go in for servicing of my vehicle (people, who know me...needn't worry), I want the front headlamp part replaced with a new one, because the one that I see has some condensed vapor on the inside. My logic says, if water can seep into this part, it can go inside any other part too. But for the moment, I just want the headlamp replaced. Now, the executive starts explaining me that on these rainy days, such a thing is bound to happen and you can do nothing about it because this is a problem with the bike model. He says the condensed vapor can be found on all the bikes which are my model and offers me to show some other bikes. Not a single one has water on the inside and it's all clean. Bingo, I caught him with his pants down. Again, trying to defend now, the exec says it's because of some atmospheric pressure change and blah blah blah. I tell him I don’t want to listen to the shitty crap, just get it replaced! He says okay. I have a suspicion that he would just heat the headlamp for a while till the droplets vaporize and tell me about it. Bingo yet again, he does the same thing I had figured out. I still insist on replacing it. Why do these knucklehead execs want to erode my psyche when I am asking them to just replace one part, which is well within my rights and my domain?

In Pune, the education industry is the mother of this financial coup. My fees for one year almost touch one lakh rupees, and what are the "services" or "facilities" we get? Poor (read "NO") quality teaching, no workshops, no college funded programmes, petty politics, and just one lab with intermittent online status, with blocked websites while our staff and administrators are happily chatting away on their favorite messengers and downloading games and goody stuff from the same sites, and one professor asking the other, “Sir, why is this new GTA Vice City game priced so high at $ 19.99?”
If you live here, it would make you think that the one who coined the phrase "Time is Money” must be a zombie from outer space. Need we say anything more? Once my masters’ degree is complete I am outta here! Don't you think Pune is uncool? Or maybe it used to be hip-hop earlier but not so now...?