Architecture, Art & Beyond

My love hate relationship with National Highway 33 spans for three hours, four times every year as I travel a small stretch of the 352km long highway from Ranchi to Jamshedpur and back, a journey which takes meticulous planning, a working seat belt, a dependable driver behind the wheels and a short prayer. Every year, for the past eight years I have reached the Ranchi Airport hoping to have an easy ride home only to be reminded why I am forced to feel life out of the state is better.

This year, my surprise monsoon visit home in turn had packed a surprise for me, waiting in the asphalt or the lack of it amidst the woods of Dalma hills. The first 30km road from Ranchi and Jamshedpur is like the trailer of a M. Night Shyamalan movie or first chapter of a Robin Cook book. Wide roads with double lanes, a notable divider and pothole free surface sends you off merrily looking forward to the natural beauty on the way only to be left disappointed and sometimes disjointed at the end.

The 129km from Ranchi to Jamshedpur is flanked by the Dalma hills, the contoured landscape, unending greenery, agricultural fields fading into the hills in the horizon and dissected by the rivers. In parts the scenery surrounding the highway is breath-taking.

But what runs in the middle is no less than a devil. The four lane highway in the making has been ‘in the making’ for the past four years, as I can recollect. The existing two lane highway slashed and turned at every few meters precariously accompanied by its dishevelled sibling which refuses to take shape of adolescence. The narrow road with its many potholes, bridges with parts deemed unusable with drums circling them, the desire to overtake the many heavily filled trucks and the desperation not to ram into the oncoming vehicle, makes the experience driving the few hours on the road agonising.

If the above was not enough add the cows, dogs and goats playing hide and seek with the traffic in between the villages and the people on the crowded markets on either side of the highway at the village markets. And what seemed like a pun to me, every few meters was a board alarmingly proclaiming the emergency number in case of an accident as if it’s saying ‘your fate is sealed’. The encouraging part of the journey was to see large groups of girls walk or cycle to the school in Tamar, some, from a few kilometres away. But my heart sank to see how they dodged the traffic, manoeuvred over non existing footpath and winched uncomfortably at the constantly blaring horns behind them.

I pity the ones who take the road every day.

The driver who drops me to Ranchi every time does two things religiously. He throws coins towards a temple en route in anticipation of blessing from the Gods for a safe journey and he pops in a packet of ‘gutka’ every now and then. He acknowledges the long term perils of consumption of the stench emanating powder, but resigns to the fact that it keeps him spiked up for the trip where a single lapse in judgement or concentration can be fatal.

The State Government obviously knows the devil within, but has been for years, inexplicably unable to drive it away, literally. One more monsoon will end, and with it will come one more knee jerk reaction of filling potholes and plastering over cracks, and so the vicious cycle will continue, as the devil in the woods will continue its reign for another year.