There used to be a dozen in the beginning, when the would was still young and a rupee got you more then a laugh. On those long stretches of roads were commuter concentration was particularly vulnerable. Then, they began to increase in number. Linearly at first, the dozen became two, the couple dozen became four, accident prone and pedestrian heavy areas were identified and inundated. They would be made outside schools, colleges, mosques, any place that was frequently visited and where traffic was high. Suddenly, a few years ago, they started multiplying exponentially. They were popping up on main roads, side roads, neighborhood streets, streets where traffic was already perpetually jammed, streets where cars hadn't wandered for hundred of years.
You would pass a road in the morning and come back in the evening to find a freshly paved pump on it. You could be watching the road all day and just go inside to take a look and there would be a bump waiting for you outside. You could blink while driving and suddenly it would pop up right in front of you , sending you flying in your seat.
It was bizarre , mystifying, senseless. There were more speed-breakers then cars on some roads. It was like Lahore had a rush, an infection, an epidemic. They popped up out of nowhere. They had no symmetry no design, no point, nothing. They resembled skin pinched between a pair of tweezers and they were everywhere! They were taking over the entire city.
It wasn't just the motorists who had their buttocks broken either, pedestrians were falling over them. They were so surreptitiously placed as to avoid detection until you were completely on top of them. they were ingenious. But what was especially puzzling was the fact that they were unnecessary. Nobody asked for them. Nobody wanted them. They didn't serve any purpose. If breaking speed was the idea, the foot deep ditches in the broken roads of Lahore were already doing a finer job of it. Nobody can drive fast on a road with pits so deep they probably go all the way down to hell. It's already a struggle negotiating these streets. If the broken patches don't get you, the cyclist and donkeys and horses will.
Even if you manage to get past them with your speed and sanity in tact, you'll only come to meet the real villains of the piece , the rickshaw and wagon drivers.
The rickshaw driver is a gentle little soul, who just wants to be left alone as he plods along the road at 5 miles an hour, oblivious to all forms of abuse while relaxing with his feet on the steering. His deadliest weapon is the pristine black smoke he releases from the back of his farcical vehicle, which happens to produce more carbon monoxide than a brick kiln.
The wagon driver is a dangerous, sadistic creature who will incite you with every swirl, cut and turn into a challenge that you are doomed to fail; getting ahead of him. To say that they drive like madmen would be an insult to the insane. These fine sociopaths have been deemed too mentally unstable even for lunatic asylums.
All these things conspire to make sure that you're never going faster then a crippled fat kid on a tricycle, anyway. So why the breaker overkill?
I thought long and hard, then I thought short and soft, then I stopped thinking dirty thoughts and decided to focus on the breakers. I could only come up with two possible explanations.
The first, that the municipal councils had run out of spaces to expand graveyards into (or build new ones) and therefor the bereaved of the city had been clandestinely advised to bury their dead under six feet of solid pavement.
That, however is a level of creativity and cleverness by the civic administration I'm just not comfortable accepting. It is uncharacteristic with their track record of zero intelligent policies enacted, and let's put it in a time frame, ever.
So my mind began to wander onto more sinister explanations. I wondered . I wondered who could possibly benefit from rending us all back patients? I wondered who had the means to pull off such a dastardly plan? I wondered who it was that had aspirations for world domination. What better way to get at vertebrates than through their spines? And then I wondered some more.
And finally it hit me, with its fists at first then a flurry of elbows, knees and legs. An epiphany, Eureka! It was the Zionists. It had to be. It made perfect sense. The Zionists were taking over our streets, butchering our cars, leveling our behinds. Zaid Hamid and his merry band of retards had been right all along, it was all part of the international Zionist conspiracy to take over the would, one speed breaker at a time.
You would pass a road in the morning and come back in the evening to find a freshly paved pump on it. You could be watching the road all day and just go inside to take a look and there would be a bump waiting for you outside. You could blink while driving and suddenly it would pop up right in front of you , sending you flying in your seat.
It was bizarre , mystifying, senseless. There were more speed-breakers then cars on some roads. It was like Lahore had a rush, an infection, an epidemic. They popped up out of nowhere. They had no symmetry no design, no point, nothing. They resembled skin pinched between a pair of tweezers and they were everywhere! They were taking over the entire city.
It wasn't just the motorists who had their buttocks broken either, pedestrians were falling over them. They were so surreptitiously placed as to avoid detection until you were completely on top of them. they were ingenious. But what was especially puzzling was the fact that they were unnecessary. Nobody asked for them. Nobody wanted them. They didn't serve any purpose. If breaking speed was the idea, the foot deep ditches in the broken roads of Lahore were already doing a finer job of it. Nobody can drive fast on a road with pits so deep they probably go all the way down to hell. It's already a struggle negotiating these streets. If the broken patches don't get you, the cyclist and donkeys and horses will.
Even if you manage to get past them with your speed and sanity in tact, you'll only come to meet the real villains of the piece , the rickshaw and wagon drivers.
The rickshaw driver is a gentle little soul, who just wants to be left alone as he plods along the road at 5 miles an hour, oblivious to all forms of abuse while relaxing with his feet on the steering. His deadliest weapon is the pristine black smoke he releases from the back of his farcical vehicle, which happens to produce more carbon monoxide than a brick kiln.
The wagon driver is a dangerous, sadistic creature who will incite you with every swirl, cut and turn into a challenge that you are doomed to fail; getting ahead of him. To say that they drive like madmen would be an insult to the insane. These fine sociopaths have been deemed too mentally unstable even for lunatic asylums.
All these things conspire to make sure that you're never going faster then a crippled fat kid on a tricycle, anyway. So why the breaker overkill?
I thought long and hard, then I thought short and soft, then I stopped thinking dirty thoughts and decided to focus on the breakers. I could only come up with two possible explanations.
The first, that the municipal councils had run out of spaces to expand graveyards into (or build new ones) and therefor the bereaved of the city had been clandestinely advised to bury their dead under six feet of solid pavement.
That, however is a level of creativity and cleverness by the civic administration I'm just not comfortable accepting. It is uncharacteristic with their track record of zero intelligent policies enacted, and let's put it in a time frame, ever.
So my mind began to wander onto more sinister explanations. I wondered . I wondered who could possibly benefit from rending us all back patients? I wondered who had the means to pull off such a dastardly plan? I wondered who it was that had aspirations for world domination. What better way to get at vertebrates than through their spines? And then I wondered some more.
And finally it hit me, with its fists at first then a flurry of elbows, knees and legs. An epiphany, Eureka! It was the Zionists. It had to be. It made perfect sense. The Zionists were taking over our streets, butchering our cars, leveling our behinds. Zaid Hamid and his merry band of retards had been right all along, it was all part of the international Zionist conspiracy to take over the would, one speed breaker at a time.
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