Driving in Bangalore traffic occasionally holds a mirror for you.
You are navigating your vehicle in the rightmost lane of an arterial road. This is important, because a U-turning tempo in the right lane is just a few cars away - with probability one. And you can't afford another red signal. Not today. Several sedan distance away, your falcon eyes locate a stopped auto in your lane and you drift slightly to the right so as to create enough space for squeezing your car in - between that auto and your right lane neighbor - Shaun Stunpike's knight-bus style. Just about when you start to feel a little good about yourself and relax, the Auto starts to move - as nonchalantly as if its state of rest or motion should not fundamentally alter the fabric of traffic. This has not happened for the first time to you, but you curse under your breath, once more. If only people on the road had a primordial sense of signaling!
But today is not another day, because a ray of reflection pinches you. You wonder, if you ever looked back in your side view mirror and said a kind word to your parents when you left home, forever. They might not have had a clue to a life without you, after twenty two years straight. Or, at your brother, whose life suddenly missed an intimate playmate. You probably never thought too hard when you left your wife, city and country - how they would adjust to each other and to a new life without you. At all those turns where the forking road took you to newer milestones, how was your signaling to your co-travelers? You perhaps thought, if you thought at all, that is how life is - people understand. They do, just that perhaps there could have been a better way to signal the change of lanes. And, when you merge back to an old road that you had plied, you shouldn't rush your way in, pretending as if this was just a normal course of life. Go slow, pause or wait for the signal - you make a note to yourself.
This is when you muse, one must learn from nature. You look around. February's ending and fallen leaves pile up along the edges of your city road. You look up. The yellow of the
Amaltas, the purple of the Jacaranda and the orange of the Gulmohar almost blind you. Even nature seems to be in a rush, giving mixed signals.
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