Parodic rumble(rs) over speed breakers

By Bikram Keshari Jena

They won’t give up,

their wont to confront.

We sway,

to keep away from affray.

We phew in eschew!

But they pursue our rescue!!!

Speed breakers, for some, seem to be an unwanted lot in every sense of the phrase. They bulge out like excess fat from the waistline of even the narrowest and malnourished roads. They are ever present and have rumpled the asphalt of time with their footprints.

Everyone sports them nowadays- cutting across the demographic asymmetries of roads. Highways have it, low-ways have it. Village roads vaunt it, pillaged roads flaunt it. Concrete roads relish it; in-concrete roads brandish it. Narrow roads brag it, fat roads wag it.  They are everywhere and if one were to ask a common commuter- their mania is maniacal and rage an outrage to an extent exuding a feeling that those who don’t have it, they crave for it.

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Recently, we have been told by the establishment that a new generation of speed breakers will replace the old ones. They are called Rumblers.

They truly feel new generation in their new avatar. If the speed breakers of yesteryears felt like tumor on asphalt, these feel like a neat bandage on a recently acquired swelling. If the earlier ones were monochromatic, these are dichromatic in their black and yellow paint job and are neatly laid out in a pattern of symmetric quadrilaterals. In a fleeting ocular malfunction, they can be misunderstood as a chessboard made for and by the colour blind.

The government says that they are effective and to be honest we have to take their word for it.

The word rumbler, even in its enunciation and audition starts a sort of shudder in your larynx which trails off in your tympanic membrane. In flesh and blood they are even more cacophonous on our sensory faculties.

Though speed breakers are too purposeful to be hospitable one could feel the difference in hospitality like evading the jostle of a preventive custody and settling for a lathi charge.

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While the speed breakers feels like a violent rock to the cradle by a multi-tasking mother, rumblers toss one up in the air like an irate nanny. If one misses to spot a speed breaker, one ends up getting a slap on the face, while in case of rumblers one runs the risk of getting splattered on a wall as if fired from cannon. The marginal cost of heedlessness between both is profound.

But as pointed out at the beginning of the observation, heed them not, at your own risk. They man the roads braving everything under the sun, even ire of the living and the non-living.

Roads they man,

braving everything they can.

Taking everything in their stride,

for we have a safe ride!