Traf@#$%ed in Mumbai: But this is how Bollywood stars beat it

Mumbai traffic makes you cuss and swear every second you are stuck in it. It’s a traff@#ked situation. But the potholed city roads spare no one. You’d think, with so much money in the city – and its celebrated industrialists, film stars, financial wizards and corporate giants – the traffic ought to be more organised, but that’s wishful thinking.

Film stars, like other inhabitants of the city, spend hours in traffic. A couple of years ago, they would kill time by watching films on their portable DVD players and sports on mini TVs installed in their cars. It was also the perfect time to catch up on correspondence and return calls.

Technology has changed things; stars can now do much more than just watch movies in their pimped-out rides when stuck in a jam:

• Most stars catch up on their sleep, especially those who own vanity vans, like Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan. Ironically, these two superstars don’t care too much about their sleep!

•  The other most common thing stars do is return phone calls, check emails, and operate their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Tweeting blow-by-blow accounts of maddening jams is a favourite among them.

• Salman Khan, the biggest star on the Bollywood marquee at the moment, doesn’t conform to written rules. When he noticed his filming schedules were getting busier, taking him up and down shoot locations on choked roads, he switched his mode of transport. He got himself a bicycle and pedaled all the way to Film City in Goregaon, a considerable distance from his Bandra home, star status be damned. Fans who saw him biking it, started trailing the route every day; Salman was friendly and undeterred by their fawning over him. With his exhausting bike ride, he got his daily cardio fix and saved his valuable time .

• Shahid Kapoor prefers his Harley Davidson motorbike to his swanky cars when he goes out for a party. He made a grand entry on a bike at Ranbir Kapoor’s house party recently, much to the delight of passersby and guests. In his case, it is a “boys and their toys thing”, where he enjoyed riding the machine and beat traffic at the same time.

• Katrina Kaif once hailed a cab to make a quick dash to the domestic airport in Mumbai because her driver was stuck in a jam. She was headed to Bangalore for a film promotion and could not risk missing her flight. Any other actress would have used the old traffic jam excuse as a convenient reason to miss the flight —which was true in Katrina’s case — but not her. She didn’t think it was a big deal at all. She brushed it off as something thousands of girls did all the time. It was only when the cabbie saw her in the rearview mirror and gulped, did she realise how uncommon it was.

It’s another thing that stars cause traffic jams, but that is not as agonizing for the public as traffic that moves at a snail’s pace in India’s fastest city.

Top 5 things stars do inside their cars when stuck in a jam:

1. Tweet photos of the jam and plug their upcoming films.

2. Do media interviews over the phone.

3. Call up their families and catch up on their lives in between work calls.

4. Watch films, foreign ones mostly.

5. Sleep. Not with their co-stars, just by themselves.