Highways are my happy place because they take me away on holiday

In general, too, road journeys, especially if the choice of holiday destination is a day-long drive, as most of my family’s are, have a particular excitement, intimacy, and unpredictability to them. The vehicle is a train’s coupe but without the legroom and the loo, and certainly nowhere to escape. One is compelled to be convivial and cooperate over baselines like the genre, vintage, and decibel level of music, pick of snack, and the just-right time-gaps between toilet stops, and build quick consensus between staying safely stalled in a jam or taking a circuitous detour guided entirely by Google Maps.

In this past pandemic year, I have seen little of our highways, some of which I had come to know like the back of my hand. In fact, so stationary was 2020 that I can even count the number of times I’ve driven on the highway that’s but a stone’s throw from me. And now, since the past 39 days, highways are all the news. Our pizza-scoffing farmers have occupied plush massage chairs carted for tens of kilometres on trembling trolleys on some of these arterial lines, slicing through the pizza base of our currently freezing-cold lands in the North, upsetting our Best Man’s carefully laid plans. As what must be one of the most easily polarised peoples, we’re yet again split wide open. Are you pro-protest? Are you anti-farmer? Should Khalsa Aid be allowed to provide aid? How long is the highway of your trust? Why does every shiny, new promise to every ‘mini-India’ begin to seem rotten as rust?

Many of us urbanites are now also somewhat like that child of the developed world who needs to be told that eggs and vegetables and bread don’t ‘grow’ on supermarket shelves. We are having to do a Rapidex degree in the double major of agriculture and law, and some days a PhD in Punjabi, even as the Rapid Action Force stands like well-dressed scarecrows in these suburban fields of turbans. There is a palpable unease, and the farmers seem determined that, for once, it is their way or it is their highway. But people, us supermarket shoppers, also need to find a way, as they did recently on NH48 to circumvent a blockade.

As vehicle upon vehicle piled up on a particular stretch of NH48, and time passed, that proverbial ‘positivity’ about anyone in authority showing up to do anything and patience ran thin. The choice was clear: go back or get across to the opposite lane that was free, and traverse the village roads crisscrossing the fields. And then, all of a sudden, a few duly-masked men who had tumbled out of their warm seats to get a stretch and a better view of what lay ahead came together and began to ‘modify’ a broad kerb built between the two opposite lanes. As many such highways go, there was a significant mismatch in the height of these two lanes. A few large stones and some stray bricks were found and laid out to give vehicles a smooth leg-up over the kerb towards the ominous descent. One gentleman scurried to his vehicle and returned, smiling, with a long industrial-grade metal rod and immediately got to work, breaking anything that may break the underside of his car. And voila, a way had been found for everyone.

The farmers’ protest stayed put, and the traveller’s plans did, too. As a wide-eyed witness to this willfulness, I cannot but wonder if this genre of ‘jugaad’, a Hindi colloquial for what Professor Jaideep Prabhu, author of Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth defines in the context of business as a “frugal, flexible, and inclusive approach to problem-solving and innovation” is at all good. Could too much of ‘jugaad’ regress us into justifying the laws of the jungle: of law-abiding citizens being so pushed to make their own breakthroughs through impasses created by an impassive dispensation and impassioned groups? I think not, but should I even care? My journey was made complete.

But New India has promises to keep, and miles of such highways to keep clear before she can peacefully sleep.