Indian roads are a wonderful place to be on. Before you step in those not-too-wide asphalt covered tracks, everything that you've accomplished or not runs through your mind like a slide show. No other nation has roads that give you such a feeling! It is exclusive, worth cherishing! Each day on an Indian road is an adventure... a journey that is short on scale but very big on excitement! Every moment is a delicate mixture of grit, hope, excitement underlined by heavy tones of fear, or rather 'mortifying terror'. Interesting thing about Indian roads is that before you ever put your foot down on them, you don't even know that you could be killed in so many different ways! You could be run over by a speeding car...or fall victim to a daredevil motorcyclist... or even killed by a cow... or bitten by a dog or even murdered by a blind psychopath with an axe... okay that’s a bit of an overstatement, but still opportunities of losing a body part are infinite!
You might think that I am just exaggerating a simple fact. Well I owe you a sincere apology of not making myself more factual. lets see...
It's an interesting thing too, to travel on these paths that have as much diversity as our nation itself. In some very exclusive places there are wide multi-laned roads in which various types of vehicles run like they do in every other place in the world... but this isn’t the story on the larger part of our big nation. There are two lane roads, one laned roads, even 3/4 laned roads; there are roads that have tarmac and which are smooth and there are road that are not!
But don't let that fool you. You will die when you will die. And that can happen on any of these various type of roads!
In my opinion, the only man who is completely safe on the Indian roads is either the one who is wearing a space suite over a metal armor or the one who is inside an heavily armored vehicle!
The people who drive on these roads are as diverse as these roads. Especially the two-wheeler-riders...
In one of my travels in an auto-rickshaw on of our roads I got an opportunity to witness the diversity in driving styles. Some of the riders are so fast that you can barely discern the number of people sitting on the vehicle. You see the right next to you in one instant and then you either see their tail-light as a small speck far-far away, or in most cases you see them lying next to the road, heavily mangled, with the shatters of their bike, either unconscious or crying for help!
The other kind of riders is the ones who usually have the visage of an old man, usually bald with round spectacles, and mostly on a scooter! These are what I call the Slow Locomotive User Guys or simply SLUGs. You can walk right next to them as the drive, have a conversation, ask them about their life, and tell them about you’re, and can play chess, and... Then you get tired and remember that they are on a vehicle! These people are so exceedingly slow... so sluggish... that they don't get run over by a drunken drivers, but frustrated ones!
Jeremy Clarkson, the host of the TV show Top Gear writes in one of his articles, ‘...In Greece, there are only two ways by which you can be killed, by being run over by a bike, or by being run over by a car...’.
I must say that though killers in our nation are not so specific in our methods; we certainly can claim that ‘mostly’ people get killed by being run over by either bikes or cars!
Our road signs are also an interesting addition to the fun that our roads give us!
On one of my recent exploits, I encountered one such utterly ridiculous signs. It claimed
“Sharp Curve ahead, Drive safely!”
This might not sound ridiculous but when there is NO darn curve for the next kilometer or so... it is pretty stupid!
But even after being broken, distorted, disfigured, in-bad-shape, poorly-looked-after, and too thin, no other road is as much fun to drive on! The utter thrill of driving with death on the passenger seat has its own excitement!
I would like to conclude this short essay by giving you a little safety tip on how to cross the roads:
Look Left, look right; repeat this procedure over five times. Stop. Take a deep breath. Remember one of you deities (Multiple if it’s a freeway)!
Then...
Cross as if it’s your last walk on the road!
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