The road back home from work is an excruciating 40 minute bumpy ride - so bumpy that at the end of it you wonder if all the organs in the stomach area are still in their designated place. This road has always been bumpy, as most roads in Pune are wont to be; but the pelting rains this year have ensured that we are left with just the potholes. This 12 km trajet would normally take 25 minutes, but in the Age of the Giant Potholes, an extra 15 are spent navigating the many generations of potholes, searching in vain for any semblance of a road. It’s like a maze of potholes through which one has to find patches of tarred road to reach his destination, and no, this not a fun kind of a maze - fun and potholes just don’t mix fun, in fact, fun and potholes in one sentence is grammatically incorrect.
To make matters worse for me, I somehow always seem to leave office well after twilight so that it’s too dark to actually see the potholes during all the skillful navigation; I usually have to make do with feeling them instead- and let me assure you, its not a very good feeling to feel, my back can vouch for that. The skill required to drive through the potholes in the dark is of an entirely different and higher level, because now one has to also contend with the blinding and relentless glare from the headlights of vehicles. With careful observation and diligent efforts, I have identified The Way – a relatively pothole-free, twisty patch of tarmac. And just when I think I have mastered The Way, it gives way to a new pothole (I was going to say a new pothole pops up, but that would have been so grossly inappropriate) and I think ‘Oh! Now that baby pothole wasn’t there yesterday…will have to work a way around it’. And then there are those times when some poor bugger is driving ahead of me, on My Way at 1/2 km/hr, and I have to go through the Mother of All Potholes to overtake him and reclaim The Way, thereby risking a fatal injury of the spinal chord - I am all but cursing him to the Land of Eternal Potholes where he may bump in peace till the end of time. I could go on ranting like this about The Giant Potholes till the end of time myself.
Last week, in a rare moment, I finally saw them potholes and their sight took me by surprise. They didn’t look anything like I expected them to look. And they certainly weren’t like the seamless potholes that I encounter everyday on the other side of the road on the way to work. It was more like a multitude of craters, like on the moon, small and big and it looked very much like this, with full zoom in, only not so cute. I wonder if it would have been fun if the potholes had been even half as cute…umm, maybe, if I could do a moonwalk.
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3 comments:
Am I glad or am I glad that ye god of fate steered me away from the Holey-Land this monsoon. Looks like I have more to thank the Skies for than i knew. But then, isnt this why Pune riders are probably the most skilful in the world? Think about these boring roads here in the UK and elsewhere where you only have to sit behind the wheel - the brain is vegetating while the machine takes over!
the brain may vegetate, but your anatomy as a whole will thank those boring uk roads.
No amount of descriptions of Pune roads, however vivid or disdainful they are shall never do justice to them. i used to believe that every Indians was an opinionated authority on 2 pet subjects- (Cricket... hadn't u guessed??) and Bollywood (A nation rides on boxoffice hits n flops). ANd now a third, to add to our great nation's pet peeves. Whoever compared our great city to Sillicon Valley, an IT hub, the Detroit of the East...missed out on a minor detail. Our roads equate it with a banana republic!!
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