Whitefield Funda

I was just going through my previous posts to find that I haven't summed up my wisdom in a complete chunk. This was the purpose of my blog, to give me a detailed description of the past, which I might forget owing to various factors. So here goes...

I live in Kothari Complex now, which is located in Whitefield area of Bangalore. It is situated behind Brother's Bakery, just near the Whitefield Main Bus Stop. The complete address would be:

Room No. 207,
Kothari Complex,
302, Whitefield Main Road,
Whitefield,
Bangalore - 66

I have to go to JFWTC (John F. Welch Technology Centre), which the a GE Research Centre, located in EPIP (Export Promotion Industrial Park).

In order to reach JFWTC, I take a bus route having the following major stops: Whitefield Main Bus Stop (called Whitefield by conductor), Hope Farm Intersection (called O-Form), ITPL (International Trade Park Limited), Agrahara Gate (called Agrahara), Sri Satya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences (called Sai Medical) followed by the last near JFWTC being Vydehi Circle (called Vydehi).

I divide the journey into two parts as there is no direct bus service. Nowadays, the break is at Agrahara, from where I have to get down and cross over to a parallel road to get the next bus. The first part of the journey takes four rupees while the next takes two. The advantage in this route is that you get State Transport Buses running where you are more likely to get a seat as compared to the Mini-buses.

Till Agrahara, I have found that there is a bus every 15 minutes and usually is of the number 319B of 320E. As I can't read Kannada, I found a way to ascertain the fact whether the bus goes to Agrahara that such buses will have "ITPL" written on the stoppages list displayed on top.

From Agrahara onwards, any bus on the parallel route, for which I have to walk approximately 200m, going towards Sai Medical will stop at Vydehi (even if not at Sai Medical).

Previous to this arrangement, I used to take Mini-Buses. I used to take a mini-bus from Whilefield going towards Kadagudi and get down at O-Form (90% of them go to Kadagudi and 95% of them go to O-Form). There I change over to another mini-bus to Vydehi. This has both advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of taking mini-bus is that I don't need to wait for buses for long hours. There's a mini-bus every 5~6 minutes.

But the major disadvantage that forced me to abandon was that mini-buses are always crowded with people. The usual capacity of a mini-bus is 20 passengers. But they usually carry 50 passengers. So you can imagine the rush and crowd in them. Some are even more crowded, that let alone seats people hang out of the door completely (there's always 5 people who are having just half of their toe on the bus and the rest of the body hanging out) in addition to a completely filled roof. Traveling in such conditions is hellish. On top of that, I was concerned by the fact that more than half of the bus (usually of village-like people) empties in Sai Medical (where there is free medical facilities for the poor). So every time you travel you are exposed to 3 sick people in direct contact. This scared the hell out of me and I chose the other alternative. As the state-run buses are usually not so over-crowded, I can at least feel assured that there is no direct contact with sick people.