On Hurricane Rita and 100-mile traffic snarls

The first thing I notice after I wake up this morning and pick up The Times of India's 'Times International' section - my favourite lunch wraparound since it carries the most edible part of the news, anyway - is the headline: "As Two Million Americans Try To Get Out Of Rita's Way, There's A 100-Mile Traffic Jam." Apart from being one of the longest and worst headlines I've read in years of being a journalist - didn't anyone inform the desk that it should have been a caption, for heaven's sake! - what neoned off the page was a three-column deep-shot AP photograph of a traffic snarl comprising everything from those rather large lurchers the Americans call "automobiles" and the rest of the world calls cars, humongous SUVs and semis and Mack trucks fading from Louisiana to heaven knows which collection of bivouacs and quonsets the Bush Administration would be busy misadministrating. There seemed to be something impolitic about so many four-wheeled brutes standing still and barfing out suspended particulate matter, no doubt contributing in no mean measure to the global climate imbalance that gave birth to Hurricane Rita, in the first place. But what was even more surprising was that only on the outgoing lane was there the bumper-to-bumper standstill that Hollywood loves to have its cops leap and thump and pirouette and occasionally butt-roll over. The incoming lane, on the other hand, was an absurdly empty stretch of halogen-lit aridity coloured bronze by the malignancy of the approaching storm, except for the silhouette of one truck headed the way of my breakfast.

Now, I think back to India: a single difference that makes both our democracies so contradistinctive - both lanes would have been packed, bumper-to-bumper - so to speak - with cars, buses skewed and limping on their axles, homemade contraptions with diesel-powered water pumps as engines, bullockcarts, autorickshaws with butts hanging out of every available opening, bicycles, and people walking with weights on their heads that would snap the thorax of an American quarterback. The point here is - both lanes, it was a matter of getting outta the way of Nature's natural termagancy, and damn the police and the rest of the catatonic administration.

The point also is that since India is improvident enough to suffer every year every calamity known to humankind - and a few other unknown bummers besides - there wouldn't have been this mother of all snarls. Every inch of macadam - and probably half the boggy countryside as well - would have been publicly requisitioned for evacuation. (Yes, there is public requisitioning - otherwise called "democracy" - here, distinctly different from another major 'democracy' where unquestionable government requisitioning is becoming quite the norm.)

I'm not for a moment suggesting that keeping one lane a haven of speed while locking up the other, or that keeping both lanes moving at snail's pace, is going to save more lives from ending up in messianic-government-designed distress. But I am interposing, I suppose, in the scheme of things that Hurricane Rita is hardly the last of the gyres of Gaia's distress - Nature is coming apart at the seams - and not the best laid plans of mice and men will keep single-lane discipline from saving humankind. Unless....