For the crater good
According to this article, Gurgaon scores higher than more celebrated cities like Singapore and Hong Kong on some human index scales. Interestingly, the highest rated Indian city on the list happens to be Mangalore (48) followed by Pune (102) and Gurgaon (141) with no mention of the metropolitan hubs like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore or Kolkata. While reading this piece, one can’t help but wonder how Gurgaon — or for that, any major Indian city—would fare if the quality of the roads were to be taken into consideration.
India might have a hardon for superpower status but until and unless we plucked the potholes out of our roads, we’ll remain a third world wreck. If one reads the economics behind the level of corruption prevalent in our system, it’s mind-boggling to learn that we suffer so that our ministers can line their fat pockets. The road are meant to flop as building a tidy road would mean that there would be lesser reasons to repair. Repairing is fundamentally a polite word for stealing.
Aren’t roads like the first step towards modernity? Even the countries that are presumably worse than us happen to boast of longer-lasting tar carpets. Our roads are so horrible that they resemble the reality of Elon Musk’s wet dream: Mars. So much so, if we were to be moved to that planet, we’d be very comfortable with its surface because of decades of training by our Ministry of Transport. Uneven territories don’t bother us. At all.
However, the stretch of road outside my colony bothers me. A lot.
Although our neighbourhood is named Nirvana Country, there is no way Buddha is visiting us anytime soon. Unless he is levitating or something. The roads don’t have potholes here. That’s for losers. We have craters. Massive ugly pieces of deformities. It’s a road within a road, actually. I’ve been here for over 2 years now and there have been many patch-up jobs every now and then but no long term solution in sight.
Last week, a colleague of mine dropped me home and we were discussing how this stretch of road will remain the same even a decade later. He disagreed. “A tragic death of a child can solve this problem!” he declared. I was taken aback before realizing that he was joking. On second thought, it felt like he wasn’t. Dark humour for darker realities. Until a poor soul, doesn’t matter how young or old, loses his/her life on that wretched road, the problem will remain unsolved. The situation is so dire that a casualty might—not entirely certain though — prove as a driving force for those who are responsible for transport safety. Rudely awakening someone from their pretentious slumber please? Cool. Praying for an accident? Uncool.
For the record, i’ve expressed my complaints to the head of the RW department twice but nothing came out of my efforts. Maybe because they don’t take a tenant’s words seriously enough. On the downside, the road is only getting worse with time. Hundreds of years ago, there were tribes who sacrificed humans, irrespective of their age, to please their gods. Wonder if those gods still exist somewhere. Preferably not on Mars.
