No memories to save on prosaic, predictable drive

Bindu Menon

What is the difference between a path and a road? Wendell Berry has a beautiful answer to this. The American writer-poet, farmer and cultural critic has been a lifelong defender of agrarian values and ecological responsibility. He has also been a lifelong dissenter against wasteful, extractive capitalism. In his timeless essay “A Native Hill”, Berry writes that a path is like a habit that comes with the knowledge of a place. It is a ritual of familiarity, non-destructive and “the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around”. But the road, he argues, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste.

Berry’s words came to my mind recently while travelling along the 118-km-long elevated Bengaluru-Mysuru highway. Built at a cost of more than Rs 8,000 crore, the highway claims to cut travel time from 3 hours to 75 minutes. The journey was indeed smooth but also terribly monotonous. Apart from heavy vehicles and speeding cars on the road, there was nothing much to pique the interest of a curious traveller. I yearned for some sign of life, some forgotten memory of a place, some insight into lived environs. But there were none. We were on an access-controlled corridor, which meant there would be no familiar sights of small vehicles billowing with farm produce or roadside eatery workers waving flags to lure hungry customers. There would be no boisterous village weddings or colourful fairs to gawk at. There would be no momentary impulse to take a detour and absolutely no chance of seeing farm hands at work, kids at play, pretty countryside homes, or cattle being herded away.

Writer John Steinbeck, perhaps, anticipated this drabness of highway travel in his 1962 book, “Travels with Charley: In Search of America”, when highways (or thruways as he referred to them) were being constructed in a big way across that country. Steinback wrote, “When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” If the primitive road advanced by the destruction of the forest, the modern roads advance by the destruction of topography, says Berry. They are built not according to the lay of the land, but “according to a blueprint”.

Highways are often touted as engines of growth, they are undoubtedly engineering marvels and are an inevitability of modern life. It would be foolish and anachronistic to think otherwise. But it is also true that when villages and towns are bypassed, a throbbing, vibrant part of the country becomes invisibilised and erased from memory. On my journey, I realised we would no longer see stalls selling colourful wooden toys that were a nod to the nearby town from where they are produced, Channapatna. Nor would we get to have the famous vadas of Maddur or the melt-in-the-mouth thatte idlis of Bidadi. It’s the case with all highways or expressways that bypass small-town India and are built solely on an urban and semi-urban connect. The choice is between saving time and savouring time.

The purpose of the highway, as Berry rightly observed, “is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort”.

In short, there were no experiences worth carrying home and no memories to save on this prosaic, predictable drive. Simply because highways tend to homogenise these experiences. What was visible though was the effect on the local economy, with once bustling drive-in restaurants and shops on either side of the highway shuttered due to inaccessibility. But our lawmakers and planners seem to have found the perfect one-size-fits-all solution for this too: multi-storey complexes that will house IT parks to address the development gap and token stalls to showcase the region’s cuisine or craft. The banal uniformity of experience that malls provide will find replication in these brand-new highway malls too.

For the traveller, much like the one in Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”, the problem is of choice. Does one take the long, bumpy but more exciting route or the smooth, speedy yet almost lifeless expressway? That obviously would depend on what is more important: the journey or the destination. No easy answers here.

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