Stop! It's a Red!

The Red and Green Interactions!


   One of the places where the feeling of humanhood (This word doesn't exist?) or the desire to fight for human rights with actual deeds is right at a traffic signal. The traffic signal is one cursed place for it swallows time like a black hole but it is also a place of complex human interactions like at a battle front level and brings people  together without a discipline - the lane discipline.

    Whenever i stop at a traffic signal with my motor bike, i feel like a patient soldier or like a knight mentioned in those old poetry and everyone who stands by me in my lane (My? your grandfather didn't make it, did he?... An Indian saying?) on their whatever wheeler look like my comrades irrespective of their gender, race, creed and blah except when they honk right behind me. As we wait,  we cast momentary glances at the LED powered signals and jealousy filled looks at the lane, whose motorists are cruising fast with looks like in a fashion show where speed is the criteria and not leanness. Besides these glances across, looks are cast within the lane at the other bikes or how well bikes can fill gaps between cars or just a smile at a cute child whose hugging her dad from behind, as if the hug separated life from death. (Even i was cute when i was small :P) Then as if we are connected in a network of telepathy, we slowly start giving some translatory motion (I majored in Physics :P) to the chugging engine in unison and if some guy manages to trespass the junction in to the promised land even before the green, we either laud him secretly for his bravery and presence of mind or impatiently wait for the green photons so we can adamantly overtake him with a scoff. (We do that, don't we? :P)

   The green light as it reaches the eye, ( The human eye is most sensitive to the green-yellow) the two wheeler folks charge like a cavalry cutting and stranding any guy who tries to pass before we can from another lane and hope he/she feels that everything is fair in love,war and at a traffic light. As this happens a feeling surges; a feeling that occurs at self-righteousness, for you have helped capture the junction for ya lane and so the slow, weak and the heavy trucks and buses (MTC buses) can pass victoriously like the Israelis crossed the Red Sea. As we cross the junction, the Brotherhood/Sisterhood feeling slowly diminishes as the distance form the junction increases and it lies dormant until at the next traffic light.

    I've tried to capture a vivid imagery of what goes on at a traffic light and i sometimes think that a person is known by how he/she behaves at a traffic light.......