An Ode To NH-58

Now that I am in the final year of my B.Tech and after passing out, i probably would not be visiting Roorkee again (although i love the city) as frequently as i do for now i always wanted to tell people around me about my traveling experiences. Now that KNOL is here i get a good opportunity to do so (it is very much the same for you all...Get started!!) thereby here i pay my homage to the gracious & illusory highway.

I took a road trip to Delhi from our college, a journey of some 200kms which takes me around 6 hours to complete (now started to being more often done). The time of travel mentioned here is under the normal circumstances. The journey started from outside the college where i waited for a local bus to take me to the so called BUS TERMINAL (it remains the same till now) of Roorkee, although there was this rickety auto with the blaring noise of its engine standing besides the road. It would have equally solved my purpose(& saved me some time of waiting) if i was to board it which meant i have to overcome my inane fear of autos whom i supposedly think are 3 legged demons & can overturn anytime gulping the sane lesser mortals for eternity.

Now since i decided to wait for a bus, although the buses here are no good either... i waited for it.

After 20 min or so a local bus arrived FULL, seeing it for a moment you'll ask yourself “do i stand a chance to get in it” you do if you are stoutly built, and GIRLS you wait for another bus.... . I was a little apprehensive but i said to myself “its now or never” so i crammed myself to a 5 by 1 inch space on the foot board precariously half hanging outside the bus (here i want to make it clear that i don't travel like that and after this experience i will never again). I prayed that every time it overtook some other big vehicle it had a safe distance between them so that i reach my home as a single entity.

Now comes the part which i think should not be there, the TICKET part. The conductor was so shrewd and adamant on taking money that he pushed and shoved in the bus and in the process if a few of us fall of a running bus it should not surprise him or invoke any kind of reaction or action because he cares the least & in the first place why on earth do you travel on a foot board in a bus???

It has been estimated that at any given time on any given Indian road there can be as many as 34 different examples of locomotion in operation: cars, trucks, buses, two-wheelers, three-wheelers, bullock-carts, donkey-carts, human-carts, tractors, bulldozers, camels, elephants, stray dogs, strayer children, pedestrians. NH-58 is no exception, not only are all of these and more, on the same road at the same time but they also seem imbued with the singular purpose of occupying the same segment of space at the same time as each other, thereby giving practical proof of the hypothesis advanced by Stephen hawking that our world is not 3-D as our everyday senses suggest, but 8-D, 10-D or 12-D enabling matter and energy to slip in and out of secret nooks and crannies of the cosmos.

The process of widening the highway is underway, which in the mean time is not helping. What actually happens is that it creates a bottleneck at many places. Somehow my bus leaves behind all the bottlenecks but suddenly the roller coaster slams to a halt. Now what?? A dead heffalamp on the road, or a randy bull getting his jollies with a passing femme cattle, a local Neta giving a stump speech or maybe a senseless stupid procession on its way? None of the above.....its a barrier with a sign saying STOP! POLICE CHECKING. And all the 34 types of traffic carts, cars, camels, donkeys, road rollers will come into gridlocked stasis to get past the wiggle-woggle barrier. Inevitably, when the wiggler woggles , the woggler coming the opposite way will wiggle creating a paralysis of motion less amenable to thaw the Gangotri glacier and many times as vociferous. 'Abbe saale! Kahan ghuste ho baap ka rasta hai kya??'

when or where you least expect it, it will be there “STOP! POLICE CHECKING”.

The police certainly have a lot to check on. Except for one thing there are no police. Police checkpoints are all totally innocent of constabulary. As an exception to the rule, once in a rare while you might indeed find a policeman at a check post. And what is he checking, if anything? The variegated traffic that has been brought to a standstill, the better him to scrutinize it(for terrorists, smugglers, hoodlums) not a chance. If he's doing anything at all, its one of the two things: either digging his nostrils to see if the guck he's dug out has mysteriously changed color overnight, or he's scratching his crotch to verify that his goolies haven't suddenly dropped off & rolled down an open manhole.

By the time our bus woggles beyond the makeshift barriers we've already spent 20 minutes (can go up in situations of a terrorist attack at one of our major cities or even worse on our parliament!!). Not to mention the insoluble traffic jam which causes a near nervous break down of the docile and helpless passengers (not me because i have developed high affinity to it and i am no longer docile). Traveling by roads has always been an ordeal for the lesser mortals. The roads are bad, dropping tolerance level of the drivers and travelers alike, rampantly increasing vehicles on the road are making the dream of peaceful travel by road a non achievable target. It is our fundamental right to travel from anywhere in the country to anywhere else, but it will be peaceful is not guaranteed without spending a fortune. I hope in the coming years it improves because traveling will remain a necessity for Homo sapiens. And it directly or indirectly contributes to the economy of any country and specially INDIA which is still developing. All those years i have traveled on that highway many a times and i enjoyed it because every time it was entirely a new experience for me. But deep somewhere i felt that it could've been much better.

Whatever the case maybe, I love the city and the road leading to it. I'm sure the highway road will improve in the near future and more and more people will be able to experience a delight in traveling rather than having harrowing time maneuvering the bends and pot holes of the road.

[ Contributed By : Tapan Dutt, CS - IV^th Year ]