All of a sudden big gigantic road paving machineries arrived just outside the house we live along with all those monstrous trucks carrying the mixture of coal tar & black stone metal. Just within a day the black coal tar smeared torn clothes wore men & women cleaned the road with their brushes meticulously & the machinery paved the road.
The tots were more than happy to play onto the brand new road. Now, they can not give or take credit for spin bowling in their gully cricket, otherwise bowing the straight bowl was the big trick. Suddenly all those familiar potholes vanished across the road. It left me deep down. How could you forget those shocks to your back for years together by the potholes on the road? I still remember that particular pothole near the last corner which gave me the spondylitis. The same spondylitis later helped in increasing the national income. It made me pay numerous visits to the orthopedic surgeon till I discovered him himself suffering with the same ailment. I then gave up riding my old Bajaj scooter & bought a Maruti 800. This made the doctor richer by few hundreds of rupees, chemist sitting next to his hospital by few hundreds of rupees, Maruti Udyog by another few thousands & oil companies will keep milking me more than what they did while I used scooter, till I use the car.
How could I forget those potholes? In those same potholes during rainy season I & my friends & years later my kids & his friends had played with the floating paper boats. To cool off the plantation fever kids have been planting the saplings brought from their schools. But somehow, the sapling never thrived. This year we seniors took interest & watered the plant till one rude truck driver ran over the poor sapling & killed its future. We seniors too shed few drops of tears on the loss of poor sapling planted into the potholes with great honour adorning the real use of potholes.
Sadly now roads can not be called as roads. How can one say road a road without any potholes on it? But, well I was thinking too deeply on the subject or I was too myopic, the same municipal people had already arrived by the time the pavement people were about to pack off. Now these gentlemen were with their digging instruments & the pleasing evergreen sight I witnessed within twenty-four hours of new pavement making. I’m told by the brother in law of the neighbors aunts step brothers relative that, there is law if the road digger are provided with coal tar will be considered as the cognizable offence a suitable case for six months imprisonment & if the diggers & pavers work in tandem with each other would attract still severe punishment. So no where in the Indian peninsula this activity will work hand in hand.
By the way in the first place I realized that municipal or some other are round the corner. As all those small & big politicians are well versed with those Ten Commandments specially designed for them, a well kept state secret. There could be change in order yet I remember having read somewhere a few of them they are, ‘voters are fools & they have very short memory’, ‘thou should take up public works in the face of elections’, ‘to cover the fact lie, to cover the lie, lie bigger the lie truth it becomes’ ‘to……’.
But now I decided to teach a lesson to those politicians having done injustice to me & to so many of road walkers, road riders, road sleepers, road Romeos, & so on that how could they deprive us of potholes? So I along with my son studying in class VIth & his younger brother of age 18 months that we’d just not vote the present corporator who’d caused us so much of trouble. Rather we’d find & vote the earlier & same old corporator who let us enjoy the same old potholes & let the nation prosper.
By
Vijay Yelmelwar
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