Playing pacman on a Highway

Photo by Adam Jones
adamjones.freeservers.com

In my last post, I mentioned about the hectic touring around my home town, Madurai and my ancestral places around Karaikudi. This post is about the 'eventful' driving experiences during the vacation. The roads in this part of the country had got a major face lift recently, after the Golden quadrilateral highway project started linking most major cities. Subsequently, several toll roads have been built that makes travelling here quite convenient, atleast until one gets into the village interiors. However, one tends to have more 'adventures' in these new highways, rather than the pot-holed village roads. Tough to believe, but let me relate 2 of the several mad incidents I had to literally 'play pac-man' in.

Game-1:

I was driving at over 100 kmph one late evening in the 4-lane highway NH-45B towards Madurai, when at a sharp bend in the road, I was flummoxed to see over 100 goats crossing the road. The goat-herd was standing on the divider, supposedly unflustered, while the goats were casually crossing the highway which was passing through the grazing fields, to get home at end of the day. I sharply careened the vehicle around the road to avoid the herd that had covered half of the road by then. By an abundant serving of luck, the goats escaped jumping headlong into a plate of biryani, much ahead of their time.

Game-2:

At 9 PM on another night, I was on a different stretch of the same highway, but at similar speeds. With very minimal heavy vehicle traffic, most cars were zipping past each other at 120+ kmph. This time I was closer to the divider when at a slight bend in the road, I noticed an almost ghost-like outline of a scrawny, old man, apparently mentally unsound and in rag clothes. He was moving at a shaky pace, with his feet struggling to stay steady, while he appeared headed straight towards my vehicle. 

Alarmed, but fortunately since there was some distance to cover, I avoided the man by moving to my left and sped past him. Meanwhile, he continued to walk diagonally across the road moving to the centre, perhaps unaware of what was happening around him. Rushing onto the next toll-gate, I reported the incident and asked for help to be sent, hoping the other vehicles would have avoided him as well. While I paused for some breath, the eerie incident I had encountered in Hyderabad less than a month earlier, flashed in front of my eyes.

In a country with dense population, most of our highways have recently sprung up right in the middle of towns or villages. Thanks to Build-Own-Operate-Transfer models, the quality of these toll roads is excellent wherein 120 kmph feels like just 60, and people often test the limits of their cars in these stretches. However, the locals are unaware of the dangers lurking right next to them, while the livestock use these as extended living spaces. When rash-driving incidents kill people in the unlikeliest of places in cities, these highways are recipes for disaster.