For a large part of my life I was rather apathetic to the popular outrage around potholes. They always struck me as one of those collectively dramatized civic complaints. Hardly the stuff of existential suffering made to look like a villainous cavity of the society.
Of course I had the privilege of making that assertion from the velvet cushion of a neighbourhood whose roads are, to this day, unnervingly pristine. (When you haven’t bled, you’re quick to call war a performance.)
But the universe has its peculiar ways of showing you the reality. I recently started living in a flat near my college, and it led me into the sect of those who know. Every single point that people make about potholes is true. The first week was enough to reframe the naive civility of my previous stance.
The configuration of the urban terrain here is so inverted that one could argue that the authorities have engineered stretches of road between potholes and not the other way round. The potholes are so frequent and deep that they make you question the very definition of a road.
I cycle daily, a relatively gentle mode of transport, but even then I find myself bracing for impact at every few meters. These potholes demand payment twice, once from the body and once from the wallet, as if discomfort itself were being taxed. I need to refill my bicycle tires more often, tighten the loosened screws, and by the grace of god, if its rainy seasons, be ready for your clothes and bags to be a mud-filled mess. One can only extrapolate what this terrain does to people on two-wheelers or cars: the abrasion, the wear, the constant possibility of mishap, the way it slowly extracts sanity and money under the guise of urban life.
Potholes, I now concede, are not mere geometric deficiencies in municipal planning. They are low-frequency violence embedded in infrastructure.