Hypochondria, and umm, well Flyovers!

So I was in bed the other day, and things started to get real bad. I had been feeling uneasy and uncomfortably warm for a while but I passed it off as lack of new music, good films, women and great TV. (Notice the lack of an adjective for women. And it wasn't even intentional.)

Then I felt myself sweating a bit. I mean who gets exhausted with just half a day of lying down? So I got really worried. Soon my chest felt tight on the left side.

I told myself it was absolutely nothing and adjusted another pillow (fourth) under my head before turning to CNN. News of the global economic mess and Rihanna getting assaulted should distract me from my own petty complaints, I thought.

That bastard Anderson Cooper looked younger than me!

So, the sweating worsened and my throat started to get dry. I stretched my arm out for some water. But it tasted fairly weird. What was happening to me? I had this pain in my wrist last week, and my knees have always hurt slightly. Surely it couldn’t be arthritis? My chest was now collapsing on itself. I could hardly breathe.

Even my feet were sweating now. Heart attack??? I cursed myself for archiving all those upsetting chain mails with symptoms of heart failure and stroke.

Just like a dry nose signals illness for Cookie, the absence of the colourless single strand of hair from the middle of my forehead spells doom for me. When its there, my life’s pretty brilliant. It was a flourishing one and a half inches long when I got my first job and tipped two inches when I was at the peak of my acting career and prowess. The last time it disappeared I got painful kidney stones!

It was about the size of a half-severed mosquito leg. SURELY I WAS GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!

Why didn’t I eat more fruits? Why didn’t I ask out more women? Why didn’t I exercise more? Why hadn’t I made my movies yet?? No one will even care…

I was still lying there; most of me was now covered in sweat, my head twisting madly, as if trying to release itself from my diseased body. (That would be cool, though! Detachable heads!)

Then my mother came in. She never knocks! No one ever takes me seriously at home!! Where’s the respect for privacy? They will regret it when I am gone!!!

“Why haven’t you switched on the fan? It’s 35 degrees!!!”

“Oh?”

The fan starts to turn around with the enthusiasm usually shown my kids on the first morning of the new academic year. Slowly all vitals returned to normal. Hehe. Silly me.

Ya, so the summer really made a sudden entry.

***

Fa Hein (399 BC). Megasthenes (350 BC). SlowtumblingLife (2007–09)

As you can see from the abovementioned calendar, great scholars of international repute and profound depth have often visited the bustling historic megapolis of Patna and chronicled its gala journey through time as one of the oldest and dirtiest continually inhabited places on the planet.

Btw historians have now firmly ascertained that Fa Hein was a common junkie who just got phenomenally lost looking for opium in China and tumbled across Nepal into Bihar. And I have evidence of his records being nothing but drug fueled fantasies.

Current view of the "80 Pillar Hall", Fa Hein documents spending 'vivid' afternoons here.

Saala.

Since Patna can’t compete with other cities of the world on obvious and mundane parameters like quality of life and women, the proud people of this city have created their own titles.

We have the largest colony in Asia. Kankerbagh. It’s a fact every kid knows in the city and something everybody is extremely proud of. There is East Patna, West Patna, South Patna and Kankerbagh. Ergo. Of course, nobody in the real world has ever heard of this colony.

Why isn’t it simply the largest colony in the world, you ask? Well, to keep a tradition alive it has to be vaguely plausible. Our kids won’t believe just anything, especially after wretched satellite TV.

We also have the Gol Ghar. Well it’s not a title really, but it fills our middle class chests with solemn and massive pride nonetheless. It is after all the only Gol Ghar in the world. It’s a massive pointless structure, originally intended to be a granary. Now it’s a picnic spot for the really jobless and a good way for the government to siphon off money by keeping it under “restoration” for the last eighteen years.

The Historical Gol Ghar.

Oh, my historical note is not about the above. It’s about a flyover actually.

ChiraiyaTadh Pul (Flight of a Bird, Bridge) – A Saga

Yeah, when you have just one flyover to name in your city you have the time to be poetic and use mythical refrences in Sanskrit.

So ChiraiyaTadh as it is fondly known connects Kankerbagh to the rest of the city and world. It had been around for ages, and when the new state government was sworn in a few years ago on the mantra of change and hope it vowed to renovate the quintessential architectural symbol of the city.

To begin with they completely destroyed the earlier bridge. And for fifteen long months Kankerbagh, the largest colony in Asia, was ignominiously cut off from the rest of the world.

The gentle people of Patna after years of misrule have been robbed of much, but on the flipside they have developed colossal reserves of patience. However even those were tested when the new bridge upon inspection turned out to be exactly similar in all respects to the old one.

There was a violent upsurge; residents of Kankerbagh demanded something substantial for fifteen months of torture. The state government was in a fix, they had run out of ideas! To buy some time, they briefly cut off electricity supply to the colony and much of the city. Everyone forgot about the bridge.

And then the government came up with a great idea. They erected two massive pillars at the center of ChiraiyaTadh and converted it into a suspension bridge. Except the bridge wasn’t really suspended from cables, it was supported by a series of pillars. ChiraiyaTadh Pul was a suspension bridge in the same way that Eminem is black. Basically it wasn’t, but it tries to be.

Within months Kankerbagh and much of the capital city was up in arms. They realized they had been had. Once again there was no electricity.

And then the government came up with another brilliant idea. They decided to gift the people a second ChiraiyaTadh parallel to the first one, now traffic would be smooth and undisturbed on this arterial route of our historic city.

Of course, there was no room for this second lane, and much of the celebrated Kankerbagh had to be razed to make space, severely threatening its esteemed status amongst Asian colonies. But the state government was not one to be held back by such trivial concerns.

Construction on the second bridge was severely delayed, mostly due to boredom. When, suddenly, one cold winter evening large parts of the bridge collapsed. Much action followed, the opposition parties boycotted assembly sessions, the media carried the news on the front page and beat its chest and some residents of Kankerbagh went on indefinite hunger strike to protest the inferior quality of building material.

The residents were once again briefly distracted.

In the meantime, the government cooked up yet another infrastructural innovation. They awarded the city with a longer second lane. Yes dear reader, they decided to make up for the collapse by giving more ChiraiyaTadh to the city.

There was much city-wide merriment. We could soon have the longest flyover, and definitely the stupidest.

Since then the bridge has been extended once more. The reason? Well, construction stretched into the elections, and the election commission guidelines blocked any inauguration for fear of it being used as a publicity stunt.

So the ruling party did the obvious thing.

The final bridge will be inaugurated after the elections.

Like all visiting scholars, I felt it my duty to document the life of this extraordinary city. For you dear reader, and for future generations, I have a diagrammatic representation of the idiocy. It should make things simpler.

The Travails of the Second Wing of ChiraiyaTadh Pul.
(the third structure identifiable from the moon, after The Great Wall and AIG's Debt)


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***** <-- Point of Collapse
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****** <-- Intended end of flyover.
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**** <-- Elections hit us here
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**** <-- World’s Sharpest Declining Flyover (Actual Reliable Data)
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<-- City Ends Here