Driving in Europe or the US is fun, especially if you are used to driving around in India. Once you get accustomed to navigating your way through free-weaving cars, freer-weaving bikes, and pedestrians taking park-strolls right across roads, driving through an organized road network with disciplined drivers and no pedestrians is almost a let down. Its like you’ve been trained in swordsmanship and then someone hands you a fine cutlass with which you are supposed to slice potatoes – actually wait, bad example because that could be tricky!
Anyway, disciplined driving is good – the safety associated with road discipline is worthwhile. However, it does get stretched sometimes, especially when driving around in suburban US, when the idea of discipline gets stretched to a level of paranoia. Driving into a suburban neighborhood is like being handed a bunch of restraining orders. Paraonia is overstretched, and pedestrians will run away screaming if your car going at 5 mph does not slow down to a halt when you are at least 500 meters away. Sometimes I’m forced to wonder what it would be like, if someone randomly switched a couple of roadies (one each of the wheeled and legged varieties), between say Marathahalli (Bangalore) and Moorestown (New Jersey)…
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Pedestrian Rustom Kaathe was an early riser. The disciplined man that he was, forced him to leave the comfort of his rot iron bed at half past six each morning. Having attended to the necessary ablutions, and rudimentary victuals, which whilst not enough to break his fast, at least had the affect of cracking it ajar, he would set forth onto the streets of Bangalore. The rest of his mornings were devoted to a noble cause –gripped by untainted altruism, he would set forth to improve the driving skills of bike and car uses in his city, by taking park-strolls right across the city’s roads.
Chauffeur Ghuman Dey was a pious man of many talents. While Rustom was strolling across roads and highways at leisure, Ghuman was earning his penny’s worth seated behind a steering wheel. His multiple talents enabled Ghuman to impart the sharp fourty five degree swings that the steering required every few seconds in order to keep the car running, and at the same time attend to his mobile phone, and take alternative swigs at his coffee and cigarette. A small picture of his favorite deity “Yama” sat upon the dashboard and smiled back at Ghuman appreciatively.
Meteorite Bobbit’s Rock was a lonely being. Having been cut off from its parent planet by an inter-planetary collision, Rock was thrown outward from its home galaxy into the Milky way, where it soon found itself trapped in an elliptical orbit around an unusually unenthusiastic Sun. A few billion revolutions around this dreary track, and frequent implosions of an active onaclov upon its surface meant Rock was bored to the core. Not unexpectedly, as Rock raced past that big blue sphere, whose first sight had excited it, but was now just a repetitive uninteresting sight, it let out a feeble yawn. The yawn propagated to Earth in the form of complex electromagnetic flux waves that took the shape of an earthworm hole. Both Rustom and Ghuman were caught completely unawares as these waves hit them…
The philanthropist Rustom was standing on Marathahalli junction wondering which of the intersecting roads would be the least safe to stroll across, when Rock’s flux discharge hit him. In the flash of a second, he now found himself standing at a strangely desolate intersection with a street sign that said ” Moorestown Street”. Rustom was confused. He knew not what scheme of things had brought him to this strange land, or the strange land to him. Unable to process his surroundings, or extract coherent decisions from his brain, he fell back upon his instincts, and decided to continue with his one purpose in life – improving the motor skills of unskilled car drivers. He stepped off the sidewalk with great élan and resumed his stroll.
However, this was Moorestown and not Marathahalli – a haven of extremely disciplined (read paranoid) drivers. When Rustom stepped off the sidewalk, the nearest car was two miles away on a parallel road. The disciplined driver of this car caught a glimpse of Rustom and deciding not to take any chances slammed his brakes hard. Since the driver was unaccustomed to pulling a stunt like this, and since the road he was traveling on happened to be a national highway, a hundred cars behind him which were until then gliding comfortably in auto-cruise mode, slammed straight into him and more were following suit. It was while cars were piling up in this fashion, that Ghuman with four wheels in sync and one wheel slightly out of sync found himself driving along on the verisame highway.
Now, Ghuman on arrival was more flabbergasted than Rustom had ever been. Not only did he find himself in an alien land, but for some reason, all the cars in this land were piling up one on top of the other in an attempt to reach the moon. Well, Ghuman did not care too much about celestial quests, and at this moment his navigator’s instinct kicked in. He swerved his car right off the highway, cut through the grassy turf beside it, and quickly jumped into Moorestown Street which ran in parallel, shaving a few hairs off Rustom in the process. While Ghuman was smirking at his driving skills, and Rustom was swelling in pride at having nurtured expert drivers like Ghuman, the residents of Moorestown were not too impressed at the sight of a vehicle cutting across roads and shaving hairs off pedestrians. In a flash the entire township turned to chaos. People started running helter-skelter screaming that Armageddon had arrived, and that satanic cars were mowing down pedestrians all over town. One bright fellow looked towards the highway, noticed the pile-up of cars building skyward and exclaimed that a stairway to heaven had opened up.
Just when the scene was about to turn catastrophic, an unexpected event occurred and restored sanity. Bobbit´s Rock, who was indifferently gliding away at this point in time, happened to look askance to catch one more glimpse of the blue planet. To Rock´s amusement, the planet was rapidly growing what looked like a multi-colored metallic tail. This extracted a guffaw from Rock, which in turn caused the onaclov to implode, and let out a huge myriad of weird fluxes resulting in a huge earthworm hole, which encapsulated the entire blue planet and turned it back in time by a few minutes (whew!).
Anyway, suffice to say that Rustom and Ghuman found themselves back wherever they should have been and the incident described here did not happen. If you spent some of your valuable time reading this stupid story, pray that Rock guffaws again, and hopefully you will not have read it anymore.
