It’s Hard For Me To Say I’m Sorry…
I accept, it was a BIG mistake. Please forgive me…I have been screaming bloody murder for most of the past decade. I was fixated on the belief that India’s growth can come ONLY when we start at the grassroots. My focus never wavered from the rural scenario.
I almost wrote off the snazzy Metro City stories, denying the soothsayers credit for taking India to “global” levels via malls, multiplexes & McDonalds. Well, almost!
Now, we all know that a fault confessed is half redressed, right? So I confess, on my knees, that I was wrong.
What made me realise my grave mistakes?
Well, a simple 50 minute drive from a posh NCR (New Delhi’s suburb) locality to my residence, just 6 kilometres away.
We all know that Delhi / NCR is going through a large flux in trying to host the prestigious Commonwealth Games. Trillions of rupees, earned from taxing the common man’s wealth is being “invested” in building world-class infrastructure and facilities.
If you’ve been here or stay here – you know how wonderfully the government is doing it. No pun intended, here, yet! Work in progress & traffic at sleep is an intrinsic part of us since quite a while.
That 50 minute drive converted me too, to a believer.
The main road (NH8 – NH24 Connector) which I’d normally take to cover the 6 KMs, never takes more than 10-12 minutes, if driven in a non-Delhi style. The retired F1 drivers (millions abound) take less than half that time.
Recently, the Ghaziabad municipality started widening a narrow culvert (over a dirty, clogged canal) to a nice, world-standard steel bridge. Obviously the traffic has been diverted on both sides of the culvert. Everyone now needs to take a U shaped detour, to bypass the bridge / canal. I too did it, last evening. My car was waved away to the detour, by a very professional traffic policeman exactly at 7:55PM.
The new route looked interesting, with undulating barren fields dissected by a less undulated strip of loose stones. There was so much dust from the spinning wheels, that I was praying to God for granting me a temporary CAT-3 capability. My wish was not granted of course & for the 1st 7 minutes / half KMs, I was under the impression that we were just having a field-night in freezing nowhere land.
Soon that impression & my chronic peeve that India’s rural is in the hinterlands, shattered. In fron of me was a perfect Tier-3 village, with a very narrow cobble-stoned path, almost Venetian with overflowing open-drains. Buildings started right from the edge of that sliver of road (?). Streetlamps were few & far between. Not that they were necessary! Hundreds of local residents who’d gathered on every possible crevice around that path could see all of us, very well lit from hundreds of head-lamps permanently fixed on high-beam setting. And as we were almost crawling (at times), their faces wore a healthy pink glow from our combined braking efforts (all the time).
In a very rural way stray dogs were shooting out of darkness, zipping down the invisible gaps between jostling vehicles. Heavily covered cyslists with unwieldy pillion riders kept weaving up and down at leisurely pace. We could see the innards of homes where families were having dinners on open courtyards. With a little effort it would have been possible to get the serial running on Colours, off the TV screens which normally face the road in villages. And no, they offer no viewing-angle limitations like the size zero HD screens we, the Metrosexuals are turned on by. That was real entertainment, believe me.
The (de)tour of this model village took just about 45 minutes, while we collectively emitted enough carbon to raise some alarms, somewhere. I am not even considering the fuel or effort cost, as my “learning” outweighed all such sundry expenses.
As of by magic, the ethnic setting suddenly changed when we spewed out behind a mammoth highrise under construction & then the 6 lane wiiiiiiiiiide road.
And there I was, a shattered man, realising my huge mistake.
Please forgive me for all the nasty words I shot at many of you.
I apologise from the pit of my heart. in pure Black & White.
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