Roadways

I believe to arrive is better than to travel. I guess that makes me a pathetic traveler, and I am one. To me, the journey always seems as an inescapable endurance I must succumb to in order to accomplish the seemingly banal task of reaching from Point A to Point B. That’s of course not to mean that I wouldn’t like going places. But it’s just that the widely appreciated charm of travel, adventure and excursion has forever eluded me, making me a ‘party killer’, ‘uninteresting companion’, ‘uninitiated’ and ‘lazy’ among several other things I can’t recall right now.

Initially I thought that’s got to do with the fact that I’ve spent the greater part of my life at a hill station. Not being the person with the strongest gut meant that motion sickness seemed a serious physiological problem that took some years to subside. That means when all my classmates were busy hiking on school picnics, I was the one realizing what anti-peristaltic movements of the alimentary canal feel like. It took some serious physical and mental reinforcements to get past this stage. 

But when I did get to move out and around in the last few years, I realized it was just one of the problems, perhaps the easiest. 

If you really want to feel what a menace over population in India is, take a Roadways bus anywhere in the UP-Uttarakhand-Delhi belt. Private buses would have consolidated my point even more but I don’t want you to risk getting a migraine. 

It’s like everyone wants to go everywhere all the time. And the irony is that everyone’s in a hurry but no one is ever on time! They say in India if you truly want to know a person, you make him sit through a sloppy internet connection on Internet Explorer with a video buffering on YouTube. I say if you really want to know him, travel with him in a Roadways bus on a busy July afternoon. A typical bus journey on these routes is a fuming dungeon- a spiteful cauldron of grappling limbs, yelling women, wailing infants, cussing men and the weak and elderly struggling for un-annexed foot space. Shoulders, elbows and knees become potential weapons as people start swarming into the bus as if it were the last ride out of 1945 Nagasaki. Count your blessings if you’re alone without much luggage else you may not survive the carnage. 

Consider half the job done once you’re inside the thing which, let me remind you, is no better a technological marvel than what the Flintstones drove. The tricky part now is surviving the amusement ride that is a long journey on Indian roads. God bless you if a pissed off elder woman is your nearest neighbor in the close packing- you might have to endure anything from belittling stares to the most mortifying way of asking ‘whether you have mother or sister at home’ when the driver (who thinks he’s on some high speed chase sequence) rams the brakes. You must love the feel of sweat dripping down from all parts of your body for there’s no way you’ll be able to take that hanky out of your pocket. Then someone’s bound to lose their temper on someone over something like 3 rupees (aka change), who gets the vacated seat, a torn currency note blah blah and suddenly fresh unbalanced forces start wrecking the unstable equilibrium. 

The music is the ultimate hallmark of a Roadways bus for it seems as if the industry just stopped producing songs after Kumar Sanu and Alka Yagnik redefined romantic melancholy in the 90s. And the super heavy base speakers hoisting the decibel level to concerning proportions will render your own earphones obsolete. Then there are the hawkers tempting you with the weirdest products in the most ridiculous tones and ways, ranging from multipurpose combs to instant constipation remedies. 

The site outside the window is no different with all sorts of advertisements of ‘hakims’ and ‘dawakhanas’ making you wonder whether you just travelled into an STD ridden African village-whorehouse. Traffic jams and vehicle damage are like complimentary greetings from Transport Corporation. The worst of my experiences involve a flat tyre several kilometers from Moradabad close to midnight and a blown engine 2 hours from Tanakpur- in the middle of nowhere on both occasions.

When the ordeal is finally over, you’ve become a believer- in heaven and in hell. But above all you truly realize, first-hand, what the country and its people are going through each day. All those news channels with their controversy centric or TRP oriented coverage fail to capture the all important and often heart rending reality of what we believe is a developing India. You are relieved to have survived the onslaught but your heart goes out to the millions who must make it a part of their repertoire. 

Actually, this is just a miniscule part of a massive machinery that is ridden with so many design flaws and working defects that it’s a wonder it continues to tag along billions with itself. We (have) become so easily accustomed to (even comfortable with) the scheme of things that its utter inefficiency and pathetic sufficiency is no more a concern to any of us. We have no qualms in littering every mode of public transport, stripping it off seat cushions or lights or fans or other such things which are installed to make the journey easy, even scribbling our feelings for our “soul mate” on the backs of seats, hoping that the girl will totally fall in love when she takes the same bus and seat tomorrow.

All this is what makes me a pathetic traveler. I never really got used to all this, therefore every bit of this and much more bothers me as much as it did the first time. And then there’s the inescapable lull- the mental stagnation of being in a confined space that disturbs my claustrophobic alter ego. But what do I do about it? The same that most of us do about the things we cry about each day- sleep out the entire journey.

I am only getting better at it over time.