If you wanted to take the road from Chennai to Trichy, Tamil Nadu, India, you would take NH45. Until a few years ago, though, if you had wanted to do that, I would have thought you were nuts.
But upon being suggested this very thing by my brother, and seconded by couple of others, I braved it. The new highway lived up to the hype. Our taxi guy was able to consistently clock the Toyota Innova 90-100 kmph in bursts along the divided, well paved, toll road. The ride was smooth and the early morning weather was nice, though a bit too foggy to be scenic.
Well, scenery is not something you should be concerning yourself with, if you desire reaching the destination in one piece. For, you see, these lorry drivers like to fly a tight formation – they are flying fighter jets in their minds anyway. It’s quite a trick getting ahead of one of these formations, not unlike getting through a Sicilian Defense in chess, I’d imagine.
And oh, did I mention that now we have lanes clearly marked, with reflectors and what not?! Advisories are posted all along, in English, to “Follow Lane Discipline”. They seem to be mostly heeded, but you’d be doing your life expectancy a favor if you didn’t assume that any vehicle ahead of you in your lane if moving along in the same direction as you! Because, some special drivers, though observant of the lane discipline, sometimes seem to ignore small details like the direction of the lane. During our 4 hour ride, we encountered a police car, a fully loaded lorry, a bus and a couple of motor bikes, all headed straight at us in our lane (on our side of the divider). The cop car and the lorry I can understand: they are the kings of the road. I don’t understand what the bikers were thinking.
One thing that struck me was the amount of heavy machinery on the roads. Seeing even a single bulldozer in these places in the deep south is startling. But I saw dozens of them, not just near the big city, but all over. I saw huge cranes at work at construction sites. This is all like seeing an elephant when go on a drive on California Hwy 1.
India’s abundance in human resources is well documented. But you really see this for yourself, for example, at the numerous toll stations along the NH45. Not only are the booths manned by humans at any hour, there are additional persons doing stuff like waving the incoming vehicle to a particular lane (even though there are functioning red/green lights to do that job), writing down the license place numbers, acting as a go-between between the booth guy and the driver, etc.
All said and done, we made it safe and sound out of NH45 and got home, where things were pretty much as they were in 1998, and that was oddly reassuring!
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