Live Ends

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When we were kids, long long ago, Nellore, our District HQs, was a small and cute town. The arterial road of the town was the Grand Trunk Road connecting Madras and Delhi (It is an impostor...the real GT Road ran from Dhaka to Peshawar). Shops and markets crowded either side of our GT Road eventually. So, a bypass road came up (now there is a bybypass and a bybybypass Road...like 'anastomosis' meaning: the reconnection of two streams that previously branched out, such as blood vessels or leaf veins...wiki).

So, in our childhood the GT Road from Madras to Nellore split a few km before Nellore and the bypass road called the Chinna Bazar Road bifurcated into an arc and rejoined the GT Road at the Pennar river. The zone between the diameter and the arc roads had a plethora of residential buildings, Collectorate, Imperial Bank (now SBI) etc. It was crisscrossed by a couple of dozen capillaries. And we kids used to play hide and seek along these gullies and discovered that, no matter whichever gully you took, you wouldn't reach a dead end. They were all live ends connecting the two main roads...in the rainy season some planks were laid to cross the rivulets.

Same with Gudur, the small town my parents settled in. The two major roads had several gullies connecting them....you take anyone and you will not be lost.

At KGP, we had the State Highway called the Salua Road running North-South and bifurcating the IIT Real Estate. In 1965, there were hardly any residential Qrs on its Eastern half (now it is the Posh Half). The entire Campus (other than the Academic Buildings) like the Qrs, Tech Market, Halls of Residence, Diro's Bungalow all lay on the Western Half. There were two bypass roads, the inner one called the Tech Market Road and the outer the DVC Road (also called Periphery Road).

Late one evening, there was a call for my wife (a practicing Doctor then) from Prof BCB, a family friend of us, that his mother was ill. So, my wife, me and my infant son reached there (she by rickshaw, me by pushbike, my son by the front basket attached to it). And my wife wrote a prescription and asked me to fetch the medicines from the Tech Market while BCB (a bachelor) stayed back looking after his aged mother. BCB was then living in one of the palatial A-Type Qrs in the West Half. And I was fifteen years old at KGP by then. So, I pushed my son into his basket and merrily rode as fast as I could to the Tech Market along one of the bylanes that appeared before me. After ten long minutes I found myself on the DVC Road. And I turned back and retraced my path, trying all the while to enter the Inner Bypass somewhere or the other and after another ten minutes I found myself on the Salua Road. I cursed myself and retraced my path and again found myself on the DVC Road. I wouldn't have given up that easily but for the fact that the Medical Shop at the Tech Market would shut shop by 9 PM. So, with my tail between my legs, I took the Inner Bypass Road from the Salua Road, not making the contour integral, bought the medicines, drove back to the Salua Road and then took the known lane to BCB's Qrs. And everyone was wondering what happened to gps. I blushed and told some cock-and-bull-story.

The next day before the sun set, I did the opposite of 'recce' (let us call it 'wrecke') and found that I ought to have taken a right instead of the obvious straight at the St Agnes School. I was narrating this exploit of mine to Dr CLR and he laughed and said it is the fate of all theoreticians...they do contour integration when a straightforward real axis thing would do. And told me that when he was an RS in BC Roy Hall in the early 60s, he used to take long walks along all the gullies of the Campus, but constantly turning back and looking at the IIT Tower and its 'head-light' as if it were the Lighthouse for lost ships. The Campus was young then and so the Tower was visible from any spot in the Campus...but not by the time of my misadventure...the mango, neem, guava, pipal, banyan, and a dozen other shooting trees planted with love by the pioneers and tended by their successors grew so tall that we couldn't even see our own Qrs from the one right behind it.

So much for live ends.

So, when we rented an apartment down the Banjara Hills in Hyderabad and I started exploring the neighborhood taking long walks by the evening, I was often stymied by ending up against a dead end so dead that there was no left or right turn I could take...I had to turn back and try and retrace.

I could finally guess why. Like Feynman solved this problem of finding one's way back from the outskirts of a town, the thumb rule is that a gully narrows down as you approach a dead-end. Feynman's rule was to look at the overhead power lines...they get smaller in number as you go out of a residential area. But such rules work only in a 'normal' network. In the Banjara Hills 'posh' area I am referring to, there was no dearth of money but an acute dearth of living space (the lebensraum of Hitler). So, to show off their riches, they must have spent a lot of money to keep the road as wide as possible till you reach their palatial building's outer wall and stand and stare and envy and curse them. Dead Ends by intent.

When I was a kid, my Father took me by the GT Express (another impostor) from Nellore to Madras. I never saw any city like that before. So, when the train was approaching the dead end of the famous 7-platforms, I was worried it will hit the cement embankment and crash with a loud sound. But of course the Driver was good and he eased it right to the dead end. And then I was in a quandary...how and where does the Engine reverse itself so it could one day get back to Nellore the right way front and not backing itself all the way. I asked a couple of my city-bred cousins and they were clean bluffing that it takes a triangular arc between Madras Central, Basin Bridge and Beach Stations.

When I grew up to be a student at AU in Waltair, the question appeared more acutely embarrassing since the train was leading to not a dead cemented end but right into the Bay of Bengal. And I was too grown up to ask anyone and get ridiculed. I got sick till one afternoon I was walking in the Yard and found a giant turn-table on which an engine mounted and sat and the circular table turned 180 degrees and released the Engine head to tail. I guess something like this is done to Elephants trapped the wrong way round.

The question became moot when in KGP I first saw the EMU Locals...they had pantographs at both ends and I guess they are like the mythical double-headed snakes that had no front or back and you always wonder, like Alice, "Which is your head and which tail?"

One wit at KGP, Mr Rao, was talking about Mr Murthy and said contemptuously that Murthy was like an EMU Engine...you could never trust him...he can go back or forth depending on the situation...with as much ease as a double-headed snake...

I disagreed heartily...

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