That's the conclusion I arrived at when my search for a car pool for my daily commute met with a fiasco. So I picked up the resident's directory for my area. I flipped through page after page to randomly mark out some residents who I had met at the last Diwali fair. I called up the six of them inquiring if they knew any body commuting on the route I took to my office. Well, they all had negative response but promised to get back to me if they found one.

So meanwhile I had no choice but to undertake back breaking, leg-straining 70 km haul to and fro office and home. The other evening was particularly daunting. There was as usual a traffic jam at the bottleneck on the so-called highway close to my new suburban home. Vehicles began to stack up bumper to bumper at the nineteenth hour in the evening.

The snail pace of the traffic turned into a flip flop between clutch hold and accelerator before I just gave up. So did every one else and the traffic came to a halt. I lowered my car's window panes and breathed in desperation overlooking the sea of cars behind me an ocean in front. I knew I was to have a terrible day ahead as being stranded on its eve and ending up home late would snatch away those precious hours from my already low quota of sleeping time.

Two hours already on the stretch, I began to get fidgety. I had no option but to ease myself on the island on my right in full view of other motorists on either side of the road. I had run out of people I could talk to on my mobile before I got a knock on my car door. A gentleman peered through and I recognized him in the next second. He was the father of my daughter's classmate and would accompany his to the school bus stop. Often we had chatted waiting for the school bus. While seated next to me he told me he had left his old company and joined a new one which was close to my office.

I had a car pool member, at least one to begin with. The ride share was soon joined by yet another one who found us on the net. The latter was a store house of car pool stories ? so we had anecdotes on , , the woes of a commuter in the third world and the blogging as carpool information one can browse on the net.

Thanks to the traffic jam that day, I still think while