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Those perilous potholes
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The numerous potholes on the city roads make travelling a nightmare for motorists and pedestrians.
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JUST THE other day, driving through Taramani opposite Film City I was amused to see a gang of college students hitching a ride on a fish-cart. This is a unique vehicle with four bicycle wheels and a wooden platform that is the bane of drivers and pedestrians.
The boys went bumping along, careening wildly across the road, filled with a sense of adventure and pain. Its driver looked nonchalant and ready for anything. Diving into a particularly nasty pothole, the boys let loose a combined, ear-splitting scream. Finally, the contraption screeched to a halt opposite their college hostel. As they dropped wearily on to the road one of them turned and gave me a wan smile, the ache in his limbs and the tension and the neck-breaking risk culminating in huge relief.
What we generally take for granted comes like a slap in the face when we see it in a different perspective. Watching the reactions of those boys obviously new to fish-cart travel, I realised the immense impact of the city's roads on various delicate portions of the anatomy.
Each new day brings more artistic depressions and impressions on an already beleaguered road. The monsoon leaves its calling card.
Various civic departments take pleasure in delicious excavations that routinely scar the tar. Monstrous vehicles of all shapes and dimensions have been manufactured solely to test the vulnerability of our poor roads.
Add to this the precarious crowding together of breathless vehicles fighting for space. Everyone on the road is emperor. From the defiant pedestrian crisscrossing the road to the imperious, impervious bus driver refurbishing traffic rules with every outing — no one wants to back off. The road becomes the ideal showcase for democracy, the individual asserting his superiority at every opportunity.
If a poet were to personify one of our city roads, imagine the profile he'd create. A beleaguered, tortured creature crying out for physical and psychiatric relief.
With pitted face, misshapen limbs and precarious posture, and the relentless encroachments upon its body, a pitiable specimen headed for the trash-bin. A road is a road by any other name (especially in Chennai), but with the bumps and potholes proliferating, there is the danger of only the name remaining.
Someone asked me to describe the experience of driving along the newly laid East Coast Road. It is smooth and has reflective markers and presents a picture of great order. I replied, "Tense. Very tense.''
Surprised, he asked me the reason. We've got so used, I told him, to the potholes on the road that a smooth road appears to be a very deceptive thing. We are always tense, expecting to be devoured by a huge pothole. I suggested that we do something to make drivers less apprehensive.
Like our national highways that are marked NH 47 and so on, we could mark our potholes with similar numbers so that the motorist knows what to expect. The only problem is we may soon run out of numbers.
SHREEKUMAR VARMA
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