The Jaipur Highway - Rajasthan
India confronts..that's for sure..life -death- weirdness and wonder, it is all out there and on the Jaipur Highway at dusk it crowds in on you as in the gloaming approach to darkness wraiths of nothingness and shapes of living scuttle across the path..Dust moulds ghostly shapes that hurtle alongside the moving vehicles..trucks of extra ordinary length and maleable fragility trundle ahead blinded by oncoming beams and deficient in lights of their own, their true size and shape only apparent as the car you travel in squeezes between and on and through past articulations of carriages that wobble and wander across lines and margins.
Then out of the darkness real humans cross traffic lanes on unlit bicycles, with bales and baskets piled on heads, wrapped in constricting saris they cross their rural plain bisected by the nightmare of mechanised mayhem that India refers to as progress...
Oh the terrifying nature of it, the joy of survival against the odds, the carcasses of upturned and turned out trucks, the marauding Maruti's as they buzz by, all purpose, skinny wheeled tin cans of people charging against the Goliaths manned by the drunk and the weary, skinny men wrapped around steering wheels broader than their arm spans..and yet on it goes..far in the night, pausing only to offer liquor from neon lit cages and meagre food from dust drenched kitchens as a respite from the bouncing of the uneven surface, the threat of the oncoming traffic, headed in the wrong, but quicker direction, suicidal tractors and the odd unmanned camel..you laugh at yourself and your claim to love travel, your dreams of the open road, the idle thoughts of freedom and you close your eyes in horror that you have intentionally chosen, yet again to hurl yourself into modern India.
Then out of the darkness real humans cross traffic lanes on unlit bicycles, with bales and baskets piled on heads, wrapped in constricting saris they cross their rural plain bisected by the nightmare of mechanised mayhem that India refers to as progress...
Oh the terrifying nature of it, the joy of survival against the odds, the carcasses of upturned and turned out trucks, the marauding Maruti's as they buzz by, all purpose, skinny wheeled tin cans of people charging against the Goliaths manned by the drunk and the weary, skinny men wrapped around steering wheels broader than their arm spans..and yet on it goes..far in the night, pausing only to offer liquor from neon lit cages and meagre food from dust drenched kitchens as a respite from the bouncing of the uneven surface, the threat of the oncoming traffic, headed in the wrong, but quicker direction, suicidal tractors and the odd unmanned camel..you laugh at yourself and your claim to love travel, your dreams of the open road, the idle thoughts of freedom and you close your eyes in horror that you have intentionally chosen, yet again to hurl yourself into modern India.
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