Going For A Walk #Fail
From my old hood, Battaramulla. I don’t know why (or how) you’d spray paint a cat
When I first came to Sri Lanka I was like three or four. My dad tried to take me for a walk but after a while I refused to go any further. ‘No sidewalk’ I said. My parents still laugh about that. Yesterday my girlfriend and I tried to take the kid for a walk, him on his little bike. The sun was going down and the sky was a palpable pink. It seemed like a good idea. But it’s not. I was right when I was a child. Streets is mad.
Death
Anand Mahindra tweeted “Istanbul has buildings as old and dilapidated as Mumbai’s.Trick is to have clean,paved roads&voila,you have a world city http://t.co/Oy5niOo“.
He’s right. The subcontinent has pockets of greatness, but they are only accessible through corridors of death. We avoided the main road and ended up on a narrow street. Trishaws plied the road blindly and cars also proceeded in an ad hoc manner, sometimes on one side and other times on the other, depending on livestock, potholes or pure whim. A big flatbed truck was parked, blocking the road. Three stories up, laborers were dropping bits of stone and brick directly into it. It was loud, and a bit disturbing.
On these roads, a vehicle can appear from nowhere and go anywhere. Hence we were freaking out when the kid wavered even a foot from his path. Which is not especially fun for anyone.
We got nicely lost and finally ended up on a main road at which point we had the kid get off the bike. It was dark and blinding death machines appeared out of nowhere. It’s not that there are cars on the road, it’s that they could be anywhere on the road at any time. Colombo traffic cops have taken to putting up traffic cones to keep people in their lanes. On side streets there’s no such compunction. Depending on potholes, cats, rats, cows, cell phone use or whim, a car can run into you. And, aside from putting your foot in the gutter, there’s nothing you can do except get squashed against a wall.
Anyways, where was I – venal trishaws trying to squeedle in along their sides, pedestrians be damned. On the main main road, a huge tractor trailer holding like 200 canisters of flammable gas passed us, at which point my nerves were completely frayed. These roads are no place for human beings.
Disgust
I counted three prominent poops, one of which the kid ran over. We saw a weird stupa hovering in the air and walked by a canal to check it out. That sounds picturesque unless you swap the word ‘canal’ with ‘open sewer’. Which is how it smells. On the way back a motorbike sped up the tiny footpath we had just used. The stupa was cool though, they’d built it on top of a four story building.
I didn’t see any dead rats but rarely a week goes by without me seeing their corpses in various states of decay. For reference, there is the, ‘just died and covered with flies’ stage. Then there’s ‘getting picked apart by crows’ stage. Then there’s the ‘even crows are disgusted by this’ stage. Then there’s the ‘what the fuck is that? A shoelace? Oh, it’s a tail and a corpse, pounded into the pavement.’ Stage. FML.
Besides that, the roads are just dirty and guttered with open drains. The walls are dirty. Ran into a chicken coop at one dead end. Chickens also dirty.
Anyways
Next time I’m not walking around the hood. I’m getting in the car to go walking, somewhere like Independence Square. That’s Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s hood. At least he keeps it clean.
Nicely put. Where was this?
These are the things that the state should be doing, instead of trying to get into business.
The provision of basic, common services that would otherwise be neglected: this is what a state is needed for.
We have too many state authorities. Too many ministries, provincial and local authorities making it easy to confuse the taxpayer, and pass the buck.
The thing to do is drastically reduce the number of so called peoples’ representatives and use public funds to maintain our roads instead of politicians.
Dehiwela.
Thing is, the cops are actively improving traffic around Colombo. I’ll give them that. They set up cones for example, to keep people to the already marked lanes. Sometimes they seem to make things worse, but they are trying. Just hasn’t reached our hood
you have to be careful even around independence sq. took my 2.5 yr old daughter for a bike ride (got her a bike seat) on saturday morning around independence and upto Thunmulla junction and back. This was mid-morning and traffic was not that bad. It’s the way people drive – they have no respect for anybody else on the road. The bike seat is very prominent on the back of my bike and some little twat in a yellow wannabe toyota mr5 sports car insisted on driving just so close to the bike in order to overtake and race up to the next traffic light. Luckily my daughter had fallen asleep and didn’t hear me hurling insults at the little runt. Independence and its surrounding however is pedestrian friendly.
[...] in 2011. Any accident is a bad scene, but in Sri Lankan they’re quite often horrific. People walk literally on the road and lorries and buses overtake blind. Everyone drives a bit mad and madness ensues. The Sunday [...]