In case you are a regular at the steering of a four-wheeler on National Highway-16, previously known as the NH 5, which in Odisha passes through Brahmapur, Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Jajpur, Bhadrak, Baleswar and Baripada -- well why this particular NH alone-you may drive on any NH, you would be shocked at seeing the badly mauled canine carcasses lying on the road at regular distances, which is a glaring show of what could happen to those who cross the roads on a bad day.
The frequency of such tragic sights is as fixed as the toll gates that painfully hinder your way at the short and specified points of distances to spoil the pleasure of driving. If you are a dog lover, you feel pity at the fate of those hapless canines who live by the NHs and must cross the road for whatever reasons at least once or maybe, several times in a day, only to become a potential victim of speeding vehicles, which they do become eventually.
One scorching summer, while driving on the NH, a few kilometers before Tangi, I had to bring my car to a screeching halt. The reason was not to save a road crossing stray dog, because there was none on the road, but it was to avoid the dangerous feat of a beggar, who being invalid with his polio-stricken limbs, was crawling, dragging his frail body before the speeding car, desperate to reach the middle of the road on a bid to stop me.
The noon summer sun was burning the tar on the road, and except for a few vehicles plying on the road, there was no sight of humans or stray animals anywhere around. It gave immense guilt conscience to be in the comfort of an air-conditioned motor vehicle, while another human body was literally getting roasted in the melting heat of the road. The shocker was to see someone asking for alms risking his life for a little money. Besides, he was violating traffic rules. However, as I had never seen such a dangerous feat by a beggar on the road, I felt he had perhaps invented this trick for himself. I could soon see he was quite successful in his tactic.
The beggar raised his bawl and was not disappointed. Maybe, the risk of a mishap, maybe, that daredevilry on the face of a handicap was his prop for winning over the emotions of the motorists. As I slowly steered my car away from him to safely move ahead, I kept looking at the rear view mirror to see if any other vehicle was following suit. An SUV, loaded with many members of a family, having seen my embarrassment from a fair distance, had already slowed down, heaving to replace my pose and throw a few coins in the man’s begging bowl. All these took place right in the middle of the road.
later, I got used to the sight of the man, whom I would locate at that very place, using the same old modus operandi. I must say that his repeated shows lacked the element of shocks for the second-timers. Afterwards, I would escape without stopping, though driving very carefully on the brink of the road to avoid collision. Recently, on a monsoon day, when it was a bit raining, as I was returning from Bhubaneswar, I found the same man begging. This time he did not crawl his way into the middle of the road, rather he stood up straight with the help of a crutch and implored for alms from the safety of the divider platform. Perhaps, he knew that on a rainy day vehicle brakes tend to fail more often than not.
Come summer and the man will be back to his dangerous histrionics. The pity is that the beggars who risk their lives violating traffic rules seem to be above the law, because the law enforcement agencies would not impose penalty on them as they have nothing on them. In Bhubaneswar, at every traffic lights and intersections, you have nomadic women holding toddlers in their arms, standing right in front of your vehicle and begging. They target the vehicles instead of the shopkeepers and passersby in the streets for the same reason as the local beggar with his adventures on the NH-16. Their props are the little infants they hold in their arms to win the favour of the motorists.
One feels pain for the children who are victims of the law of inequality of the universe, who have no ideas how and where they are being raised and what doomed future lies ahead of them, which they can never help. These children would grow up on the streets and possibly replace the next generation of traffic stopping beggars. They may never get to know what they had missed out in the process of their growing up. Besides, education, health, home, love and care that matter to every child are a day dream for these urchins.
If you are not in the habit of thinking much, then you are on the safe side, for you then drive with a focus. But if you are a hypersensitive type, then you jeopardize your own safety and also that of those who might spring from nowhere and stop you at the next traffic light to milk on your sense of pity. And if you happen to travel between Bhubaneswar and Brahmapur on a summer day, you better drive slow when you are a few km past Tangi. As you struggle with your own Hamletian sense of ‘to be or not to be’ dilemma with regard to the debate whether giving alms encourages beggars to take such risks, a fleeting thought may cross your mind for the hapless children of the traffic lights. So unaware, so innocent, so deprived of what they too, otherwise, deserve like any other children in the country like yours or mine.