As far as the eyes can see- back and forth- there are vehicles with their wheels jammed and horns barking. Motorist set their eyes on all possible gaps and try to fit in wherever possible. Men lean out of their car windows, some to spit a jet of pan, others to abuse the one ahead them. There is a vast stillness and a ripple of chaos runs across the entire street, which seems to never settle down for hours at stretch or even days.
Hours pass and horns keep honking, people keep shouting and bikers keep changing their positions while everyone else remains stagnant. Helpless they all feel, big fat men cloaked under whites and saffrons, businessmen and industrialists, middle-class and upper-middle class, or even a few just landed NRIs- helpless on the streets of this nation. All of them wait for a ray of hope, a lead to catch, a rope to clung, a plank to get over and sail off this sea of oddly parked vehicles, but only a few get it.
That ray of hope, that lead to catch, that rope to clung, that plank to get over and sail through comes late, and takes along with it a few of them. In that melancholic air, the only smiles on their faces comes when either an ambulance stirs its way through the maddening and disordered queue or some Netaji decides to take his elite cavalcade cutting through these suffering and intolerant species.
Either of these sirens hold the perfect potential to do what possibly a hundred volunteers could not do to kill the chaos and push back the wrong lineups. As the echoing procession marks its presence from a distance, bikers descend to the footpath, cars pick up a reverse-gear and a vacant lane is created in less than what one would count as a complete minute, or two in an adverse case.
Then on that same jammed highway Netaji's procession passes by like a flash of light, while helpless commuters stay back on the same place. A few luck ones take the lead and sail through the sea of cars. Others just spit jets of tobacco and abuse the ones standing ahead them.
Netaji, that's unfair. You're so fast!
