The inkling for this leitmotif is mainly the pensive framer who sits on a reed mat on the tiled floors of the house every morning facing the French windows that stretches out to views of structured roads rimming the hollow woods and a row of hillocks. The beeline of peak hour transport makes the traffic labyrinth a piece of cake.
Most of us pay very little attention to roads - the fabric of commerce and connection, whose construction was a pre-requisite to sustain the growing population in faraway lands when journeys were dusty, wearisome and bromidic.
History echoes that a road built in Egypt by the Pharaoh Cheops around 2500 BC is believed to be the
earliest paved road on record - a construction road 1,000 yards long and 60 feet
wide that led to the site of the Great Pyramid in Giza. Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his Roman euology states "The extraordinary greatness of the Roman Empire manifests itself above all in three things: the aqueducts, the paved roads, and the construction of the drains." Indisputably the ancient Romans pioneered, who, until
modern times, the world's straightest, best engineered, and most complex
network of roads in the world.
Looking back to an aeon, should I not be in seventh heaven? Reflecting that in the age we are in today with a phenomenal progress in trade, technology, vehicular transportation and social welfare crossing frontiers, roads are an undeniable chrysalis to the entire human civilisation. However the atrabilious attitude while I compose this fall back to my growing up years in a land which was crucially lagging behind in developing its road network and wherever the roads existed they were either in deplorable state or totally impassable depending on seasonal changes. So it is apparent that I do not nurture a peppy air either way - learning about the archaic Empire's nonpareil mercantile contribution to the world or looking at the improved six lane segments of the existing infrastructure through the French windows of my house in the sojourn nation.
There had been a city I frequented during my foster years where almost all the roads were incapacious and truncating that I was aghast to believe that this abode was precisely named which in Sanskrit connotes a prosperous growth centre. Even today, writing on the basis of the facts provided by my kinsfolk, it is far worse although my erstwhile visits to the city had been shunned for multifaceted reasons. I muse over the fact that had the Maharajah brocard still in its imperium as it was in the 17th century, the city would have been named antithetically. Icky roads, not conducive to a biking environment, jammed with rickshaws, private vehicles, buses, trucks and in light of the ballooning populace is chafing the city of its unique historic and cultural identity. Faulty infrastructure and languorous administration markedly approve that we care less for future generations and low carbon development.
I pine for the livable transportation network integrated to urban planning in the land where I grew up. The chapter of scraping up "people first" road infrastructure, though started, has a long way to go. Redtapism, profiteering, political abhorrence and paucity of funds will and have always been the chronic challenges, exerting significant impacts, to architects of possible dreams.
Malcolm X once stated “Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.” I harbor when new perspectives to these most ignored spaces of our urban landscape will parlay for our next generations who would cry out on visiting the city (es), I dropped by, "turnpikes I knew not ever existed"? To them our footprints should speak of profundity.
