Drive is the Way! Or is it?

Ouch! I am just recovering from a sore back. The reason? Driving all day, all the days. Over the last week, I lost count of the number of visits to JNTU and the college each clocking 50 KM a visit. A daily trip to my cousin’s office, dropping her off at the peak traffic time adds salt to the wounds. Finally, constant visits to a consultancy wraps up the day long damage and leaves me all battered. To cap it all, the great roads of Hyderabad deceive at just the right moment. The moment I assume it’s safe to accelerate after a frustrating 20 Kmph average, a huge crater pops up in front, forcing me to either brake hard or perform a dangerous stunt in the middle of the road. I notice every other biker behind me doing the same stunt. For an outsider, this would seem like a circus where a line of bikes perform a stunt with precise timing. And it’s a shameful thing to proudly be able to say that I have all the ‘co-ordinates’ of the craters stored in my memory. I dodge around them so often that their locations kinda got etched into my brain and I can now evade them with my eyes closed. Some craters are not just craters. They are wells, wells that could practically store water. They are the kind of pot-holes that have the potential of breaking car wheel axles and bending the handle bars of bikes. My personal experience: I drove through an extremely rough patch on a road and by the time I got out of my steering wheel started making some funny noises from the bearings. Their message: Evade me if you want but I’m here to stay for at least a year and my friends are waiting to greet you every few metres as you go down the road.

 

Oh, and it’s not just the pot-holes that create all the trouble. We have some very unique things that pop up on the roads. Buffaloes! On the middle of the road! They happily and lazily walk along the road or across it or however else they would like, having the time of their lives. They don’t even find the polluted air a problem. Maybe their thick skin has some anti-carbon-monoxide coating. We should start developing something like that in the near future.

 

And we never fail to notice these ‘Caution: Work Under Progress’ boards here and there. Now what exactly goes on behind the boards, we never manage to learn. One thing’s for sure, this board lies in the middle of the road for a few months upright. The next few months, it is visibly damaged and bent at odd angles, lying on the floor, most probably hit by a speeding vehicle. And finally when it comes under the radar, it’s removed, leaving behind a huge pot hole or a big portion of the road over-turned. And the repair of the damaged road, another year is a good time to estimate. Could be more.

 

And hey, don’t forget humans ourselves on the roads. Our great road builders never bother to use a little bit of extra paint to make the Zebra-crossings. They spend days drawing the dashed lines on the roads, and go all wrong because of the constantly changing width of the road. One place the road is 100 feet wide and a little distance ahead, it’s a little more than 10 feet. The reason? Some religious structure comes up overnight and in case someone lays a finger on it, it would be nothing less than a bloody riot and clashes of communities. Exactly what our fast-paced world needs to slow down a bit. Anyway, lets back to the humans on the roads problem. So basically people don’t know when to cross the road and where. And that is why, we find them leaping across at the most unexpected places and times, risking their own lives and ours just to do God-knows-what. And are they to be blamed? No way. If they have to cross the road, they have to. But nobody is bothered to provide them to means to do it safely. At a few places I did find Zebra crossings. But they are mostly hidden underneath a sea of vehicles. While waiting at the signal, people (especially bikers) have this mad impatience in them. They not only encroach the striped lines but also end up blocking the vehicles coming from the other side of the road trying to take a turn. Call it civic sense, and they are well-educated people dressed in formals or over-smart/over-intelligent guys with their girl-friends behind them.

 

These 2 wheelers do this to you. They give you the ultimate pleasure of driving, but they have a grim side to them. They develop a sense of impatience. You start finding ways through all the odd gaps you can never dream of while in a car. You wanna get off the road, you wanna drive on the opposite side of the road, you want to drive at 70 on a crowded road. You accelerate hard, you brake hard. You learn to drive zig-zag meandering between larger vehicles and treating them like insects. But you occasionally do end up becoming the insect with your head under the wheels of a truck. And that could be the first and last time you ever did.

 

The best thing that ever happened on roads: 2 Wheelers

The worst thing that ever happened on roads: 2 Wheelers

 

And as I spend most of my week shifting between the 2 and 4 wheelers, I don’t know what to complain of, and what to praise. Whether it’s a Unicycle or an 18-Wheeler, you have to struggle on the city roads. So unless some kind of efficient public transport (brushing aside the killer RTC buses and hole-in-your-pocket autos) is provided, we sure are going to have one hell of a ride.