Funnycontrol | How to be a billion-dollar swimmer in India's Sillycon Valley

For a change, it wasn't just cabs but roads that were hard to find in Bengaluru. (Image: Arisa Chattasa via Unsplash)

Silk Route is a band whose most epic song is “Dooba Dooba Rehta Hoon”. Then there is Bangalore's Silk Board junction - the star of many jams - which has also been singing this song this week.

Bangalore, a city where cabs often cancel, has found for a change that the road itself was cancelled. Where the driver and passenger, metaphorically and literally found, themselves in the same (motor)boat.

Billionaires with villas in Epsilon and villagers also found themselves in the same tractor. (On Tuesday, Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal was seen on a tractor in Bangalore. He announced on social media that his family and dog were evacuated from his society. So for a change, man was dog’s best friend.)

The expensive cars, on the other hand, had their own Visarjan. Many a Mercedes Maybach went down giving a thumbs up like the final scene from Terminator 2 with a promise of “We may be back but don’t hold your breath”.

There were also visuals of a man merrily swimming in his own living room literally YOLOing in it. A lot like billion-dollar unicorns swimming in cash. It’s only when the waters recede that you realize the emperor has no clothes. And the unicorn was just a donkey with a fake horn.

There was also a viral video of a crocodile in the waters which later turned out to be fake ... and was actually from Madhya Pradesh.

There was the usual criticism of how a city that claims to be the IT capital can be managed so poorly. To be sure, people cannot yet travel by Wi-Fi. If they could, perhaps overzealous HR might demand that employees e-mail themselves to the office.

Unfortunately, most tech company HRs did not allow their employees to submerge from home. So some sat in their chappals on bridges to work just to make a point about (work-life) balance. Unlike the Mercedes Maybach, there is very little chance that any of them would be back if they fell in.

As desperate Bangaloreans tried to find places to stay for the night, hotel rates also shot up, to as high as Rs 40,000 per night, prompting many Oyo couple friendly hotels to become unfriendly so they could charge family rates.

Just last week there was criticism about a CEO demanding employees spend 18 hours a day in office. But that is a little hard when the office itself is submerged for 18 hours. To the average Mumbaikar, though, spending 18 hours a day travelling to and from office is just Tuesday. Even if it is a second Saturday. It’s also hard to indulge in quiet quitting in the middle of a torrential downpour.

For a change, there were no IT employees on the bench because the benches were underwater and the employees were busy scuba-diving. But HR was delighted that river-rafting could be palmed off as a team-building exercise as long as employees swam back to office to swipe out.

All the jokes about Bangalore airport being closer to Hyderabad stood cancelled. Because people had to climb to such heights to survive, for a change Bangalore airport could be seen from Bangalore itself. I am in fact writing this article from Bangalore airport while it is flooded. The Uber driver who dropped me asked for a 5 star rating before he submerged with his car in the arrival section. (It wasn’t a Maybach.) I hope you enjoyed this edition of #Funnycontrol and hope… you..glub.. glub…..Gudooop!