"India is the land of diversity", is what I grew up hearing. During my painfully slow progression through first standard to all the way to high school, every single social studies book also tried to instill in me (read ram down my throat) this as the most fundamental and important tenet of Indianness. These books and the leaders of my great country enumerated our religious, language, cultural diversity and other such abstract and useless ideas to illustrate this tenet. My journey beyond high school made me realize the gross mis-direction that we as a country have taken to characterize our diversity. Our characterization of diversity is much more tangible and real than those abstruse, abstract and philosophical ideas. Just take a tour of your city and count the different types of speed breakers you encounter and you would understand what I am talking about. No two speed breakers will look alike and one would be very tempted to conclude that they display the highest degree of individualism to be found on this planet. Let me take you through some of my inadvertent observations about this beautiful thing called speed breaker.
First of all let's talk about their presence. They are to be found everywhere even at places where they are not supposed to be found. Their ubiquitousness stems from the fact that we Indians have devised a common solution to all our poor traffic planning problems and that solution, as my intelligent readers might have guessed, is to create a speed breaker. When you see one speed breaker every 500 meter, you start wondering if there is a coup d'etat being planned by these speed breakers to overthrow all the roads and take complete control so that there is more surface area of speed breakers than roads. I am tempted to write more about their presence as to how they just appear all of sudden after a sharp turn, how every single building of any or no importance has these as its first line of defense and so on and so forth but this blog is about their diversity. So I'll turn my focus back to the topic. ( Do expect a whole book on this subject to hit the stands soon )
Since the concept of diversity is so deeply inveterate in every Indian, we make sure that no two speed breakers ever crafted by the vanguards of our retarded society look or behave alike. Every speed breaker carries a different DNA of its own. Each one can be studied as a different species and all of them share some common distant ancestor. I am sure if we were to carry out a census of these speed breakers, we would find more variety of them than all the different species in the world put together. If not, just wait a few more years. I am sure with extinction of a few endangered species and unabated proliferation of speed breakers at the current rate, they would achieve the distinction of being the most diverse family. Now allow me to talk about some prominent families of speed breakers.
The first one, and my personal favorite, family of speed breakers is the one which is designed to give the most discomfort to the unsuspecting travelers. In form and shape they resemble the steep hills of Uttarakhand. They rise about a foot in the sky at an angle of anywhere between 60 to 70 degrees then form a sharp peak before tapering down on the other side at the same or a different angle. When your vehicle stumbles upon, figuratively, one of these you actually feel like stumbling, literally, on a rock. Your vehicle bangs against it, muscles for a wee bit, mounts over and then crashes on the other side with a thud.
Then there is that pack of small little evil speed breakers. The pack can have anywhere between 2 to 6 members. On its own each one seems harmless but as they say it there is great strength in unity. The strength of these little rascals is experienced by the spines of the poor travelers. They make you feel that it's better to be beheaded by one sharp clean sword sweep than be stabbed multiple times with a small dagger.
The third category that I think deserves a paragraph in this blog is what I call the mountain category. They are not as detrimental to your body as to the body of your vehicle. Every time your vehicle sees one, it heaves a long sigh of grief and prepares its underbelly (Oooooh.. I know it hurts!!) for a long scrape against the rough surface and then muses internally in the whirring and revving of its various parts - 'And people thought Titanic was hit hard by an iceberg'.
One more interesting family is the invisible speed breakers. In the dark of the night they wear a cloak of invisibility and become totally undetectable even in the 100 watts of headlamp light. You come to know of their existence only when your car is sent flying in the air for a few meters and then crash lands on the ground with such a loud thud that your heart sinks and your maintenance bill rises.
There are many more such interesting families of speed breakers waiting to be explored and recognized but we need dedicated and skilled people to study them and document their behaviors. I am sure one day you will find a course listed even in international universities for those who are interested in studying these majestic and varied structures of India. Maybe, they will become a bigger tourist attraction and hence revenue generators than Taj Mahal. There are lots of such May Bes which I'll leave to the better imagination of the readers. So next time you hit a speed breaker, do take some time to appreciate its beauty and how it can contribute to the growth of your country.
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