Of Roads and Roadside Bombs

Street Names Are Fun 

Naming of streets has always invoked passions in India. For Bangaloreans though, Gandhi and Nehru are passé. Back in the 70s, when new suburbs were mushrooming, city planners decided on the grid structure, a la New York. So when time came to name those new streets, they left dead netas (and their road signs) secure in their graves and instead opted for the Main and Cross street system. That worked fine for a while till our elected officials decided that urban planners were a drain on the city coffers and dispensed with them. 

After rotting away for a couple of decades, planners returned with a vengeance. By this time however, Bangalore had become an IT hub. And so street names went decimal. So we now have several 100 Feet, 80 Feet and 60 Feet Roads. Damn the fact that most of the feet on the road are those of pedestrians who lack a sidewalk. When I went over the weekend with a tape measure, I found that Indira Nagar 100 Feet Road should actually be called 52.7 Feet Road, thanks to street vendors, construction debris, and see-all-you-can loos, taking up the remaining 47.3 feet (and counting). Soon thereafter, Bangalore probably ran out of round numbers. So they came up with such practical names as Single Road, Double Road and Triple Road! While I drove past Double Road the other day, I am still scouring the map for the other two. A wag tells me that Double Road was thus named because cops came up with an innovative idea to regulate traffic – one lane for up-traffic and another for down-traffic and a divider to stop infringement. Wow! Bright idea, this. And now that they have exhausted numbers and pairings, they've moved on to shapes. Ring is the current hot favorite. We have an inner RING road, and outer RING road, an intermediate RING road, and a peripheral RING road. Given the traffic woes and public frustration, WRING Road may be more apt. 

Morbid Humor 

 As some of you may know, I look for humor everywhere; even in bombings across India. And I did not have to look afar. Here are three of the best. And I swear they are not figments of my imagination. They are media reports; I merely give it the prominence it deserves. 

1. There was this set of time-delay pictures on the Times of India, of brave Officer Sivakumar from the bomb disposal squad, defusing a bomb outside Forum Mall – wearing flak jackets and helmet, crawling on all fours towards his target, then slowly and surely snipping off the correct wire, and then walking away victoriously to the thunderous applause of hundreds of onlookers. Hidden deep inside page 5 of the same paper, however was the real story. Apparently the bomb was planted inside a flowerpot. A roadside cobbler decided to beautify his store and got his wife to move the pot closer to the storefront. The lady not only repositioned it, but also trimmed some of the ugly wires that were sticking out of the pot! Having restored the beauty of pot and plant, she tended to it for the next two days, while the cobbler went about his chore unaware of the explosions rocking the city. Hooray Officer Basavamma! 

And now, we move from Bangalore to Surat. Folks are finding more unexploded bombs in the diamond capital, than fallen persimmons on a Dilworth (a cricket field in the CA Bay Area that I frequented for a long time) outfield on a cold January day. Yesterday, Pares-bhai (this name sounds gujju-enuf, I hope) found a bomb outside his shop, and this time, planted inside a trashcan. He coolly picked up the trashcan, walked half a mile and delivered it to alarmed cops in the police station, for them to take necessary action. What was he smoking? 

And finally….cops in Surat are pretty sure that two more unexploded bombs are somewhere out there. How did they know? Smart detective work of course. Apparently each of the unexploded bombs they found had a serial number painted on them. They found all from 1 to 24, except bombs numbered 21 and 22! I am pretty certain these bomb-makers are part-timers holding full-time programming jobs. How else can you explain this penchant to codify everything and this inability to make their product work even once when they went "live"? These guys are not even capable of throwing a small challenge at our bright & brave cops.