I am a static vehicle, I love my existence
A beautiful morning. Your sleeping posture was perfect, you slept like a baby. You finished your 3-month impending presentation yesterday. Last night, your mirror was bored of watching you rehearse your soul-selling act on what you’d present today. You even shopped for what you’d wear and look worthy of your selling act. Ironically, even your maid was on-time today ensuring there was life beyond cabbage & bottle gourd in your tiffin box. You set yourself out in your vehicle, your social status symbol or a prepaid taxi or a public roadway. The morning F.M. or your playlist initiates RHCP pumped-up tracks. You start your journey humming and also supporting it with hand movements like your childhood poetry recitation attempts…
You’re going along the road, the music thumps in your head, the adrenaline is meagrely shy of helping you attain euphoria. You feel powerful, you’re nervous, but you’re driven and that helps you keep your vision straight and clear like Fast & Furious’s Dan physically keep his neck and eyes straight on the road. Everything’s perfect, your minds progressing on it’s designated path but WAIT! These are all close up shots, let’s go wide-angle now.
What about your vehicle? It’s stuck!
Define stuck? It’s cruising at 2 metres/minute, at times even Nil metres for a couple of minutes. Your physical sense is in a state of inertia, in spite of your own will. Your mind doesn’t approve of this sudden embargo on your physical movement, it wishes to maintain the morning high. But alas! There are too many similar such minds on the road with too many social status symbol (your vehicle) or prepaid taxi or public roadways transport. There was a law in physics while at school — “Like charges repel each other” — Boom! This is the reason I exist. With millions of like-minded souls raging in their bliss being repelled by the road in maintaining their rage.
Now, there are multiple reasons to why I exist beyond the herculean number of vehicles on the road. One primarily depends on the infrastructure like road condition, traffic signal, construction et cetera, and the other depends on human minds and their self nourished driving/riding rules and personalised skills which are most of the time virgin to the concept of ‘patience’.
On the infrastructure bit, there might be issues but they are more or less dependent on population or migration of a certain density. It can also be a bigger issue when there are no roads *facepalm* or if its the hilly terrain that is vulnerable to landslides and extreme weather. But in context with metropolitan cities, it is always excess vehicles on road or if there’s a construction blockage. For example, ask anybody living in Mumbai currently on what they think about Metro rail development (lol), a classic example that showcases how the city lives in its monsoon’ish traffic even during winters or summers. Like walking this road would be faster but you might catch up asthma in no time. Secondly, the growing influx of prepaid taxi services has added it’s 2 cents here. Like the technology here has made our lives convenient and faster but only with booking/paying a cabbie on your owned screen, rest assured, you’re still the tortoise who’d never win the race even without a hare this time :p
On the human minds and their driving/riding skillset, in their current sphere pursue some extraordinary rules, like very simple generic rules straight out from games like GTA Vice City to Need For Speed. Some path-breaking ones are ‘There is no lane on any road’ — this is more of a freestyle attempt where they switch lanes at 5 units/minute. For instance, the moment traffic moves, the moment a designated lane driver loses focus (reasons — texting/talking on phone, sleeping, changing playlist), Bam! Sweet use of the power steering and they feel victorious.
Let me not even talk about bikers here! For them, everything is a lane, like until there’s an opaque structure to stop them, like from the divider stretching up to a wall. Humans here might fail to classify as an opaque structure as they still manoeuver through them. The new discovery, however, is footpaths and the sidelines that are as good a lane to off-road. No matter, whatever happens, the human skillset is programmed to move forward aggressively, at any cost.
So, ideally, a traffic jam as per the crudest analysis just delays you from reaching somewhere. But wait! There’s more to this, like so so so much more that’s at stake. Number 1 — Humans are more prone to anxiety and fatigue than ever before. Without any bodily movement, remaining still for the longest minutes/hours or with a deadline to be somewhere, you are more vulnerable to excess thinking (correction: overthinking!). Number 2 — Road rage is on a different with growing jams. Because you grow impatient and anxious, the potential for you throwing a reaction is higher than ever and the outcome for this? Let’s not get there. Number 3 — Honking. Now, for the visual spectators of this jam, honking is a deadly phenomenon that can get you from deaf to anxious depending on the frequency of your exposure.
Is there any solution here? Alas! Nothing that can be cited and implemented in the short term. It requires multiple platforms comprising from infrastructure to human thinking that needs to be sensitised for the larger purpose.
So, what to do? An ancient proverb says ‘Charity begins at home’… Just follow this from your gut and be a sensitive citizen. Try adhering to the civic rules and maintaining your calm. At least you start doing it and MAYBE in due course, the world follows your trail. I think it’s a lot to expect from the world you live in but c’mon… isn’t ‘expectation’ your core drive to function as you live? Stop thinking, start existing.
After all, I am a static vehicle and I do not wish to love my existence.
