Sunday, March 12, 2006

Evidence

In case any of you weren't convinced enough by my eloquent argument in favour of sidewalks, and not expecting much of people if they are told to act illogically, I now have photographic evidence. I set out on a quest today, picking up 2 volunteers, to look around the roads for problems with pedestrians. Luckily, we never have to look too hard for that.

My able bodied volunteers and I set out and captured these. I dont think the fact that I promised my volunteers chilled Red Bulls in Ettumanoor had anything to do with their dedication to the cause. If any of you are unconvinced about my arguments after this, please contact Meghant who'll "Buy you out", the same way Bill Gates buys out Homer Simpson.



where else is this guy supposed to walk?


the sidewalk suddenly turns into a ditch

blocks on a narrow ditch


the end result of chaos

4 comments:

meghant said...

dude this is cool - and you know what - i was just writing up some stuff right on so - and then i pressed some friggin' save draft and.. i've to do some math to get it back it seems... brb

thejus said...

If you were a dictator you could simply run over them like in Grand Theft Auto...LOL..

manji said...

dude...i wanna be your driver if you become the dictator. get a hummer and lets get some road kill...woohoo!

paulose said...

In the defense of the kerala govt. They don't have enough revenues. They are always running at a deficit. So if they have to spend money on fixing the roads in Kottayam, something or somebody else has to suffer. The typical answer for this is that government is inefficient, but that is the nature of government, and dictatorships are if anything, even more inefficient.
In China for example, they have built huge roads, beautiful cities, and well planned neighbourhoods. But the way they do this is to take land away from the poor peasant who was farming it.
This is a excerpt from a BBC article on China growth and the conflicts that are arising. "In the latest incident, last weekend, many casualties were reported when police broke up a rural protest over compensation for land acquired for a new road in Sanjiao township.

In December 2005, villagers in Dongzhou said that as many as 30 people died when paramilitary police opened fire during demonstrations against the seizure of land for a power plant. Officials said only three villagers were killed."
You can find the full article at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4620450.stm

if you are interested.

So building beautiful roads is not that easy. Why the western countries can do it is because they have plenty of money to throw at problems like this. If you don't have enought road space, you build a freeway in the sky. If there's no place for buses to go, you build an underground.

So what's the solution. Well this is where democracy comes in. The whole process of electing and reelecting people every four years has a safety valve built into it. This means that if the people and by 'people' we mean the majority, think that the govt is doing a reasonable good job of dividing resources amoung the various demands on the limited resources they have, they keep them in power, if not, out you go and the next guy comes in. So if you want to build better roads and have better road safety, you may have to cancel that subsidy on electricity. Now what do people want. Cheap electricity, or better pavements. If its better pavements you can bet that the political parties will pick up on it and build it. That's the beauty of a democracy, it may be slow, it may not go in the direction you want... but it'll always be in the direction that the majority of people want.

That's my two bits on it.