Bedside Manners

In the view of The Man from Madras Musings, it was touch and go. But here he differed sharply from his good lady, also known as She Who Must Be Obeyed. He felt it was serious, probably plague or at least tuberculosis, but she felt it was nothing but a sharp attack of hypochondria. And for once, MMM was proved right in the sense he was ill, but not to the extent that he imagined. It began with a cough, and then lack of appetite and finally fever. And it ended in the reverse order in the sense that the cough is still around. In a way, MMM’s good lady was right too – MMM did not waste away but recovered after three days of rest. And so he has lived to tell the tale.

This tale, by the way, is not of his illness but of the way people behave in our city when they call and get to know you are ill. There are a few decent people who will wish you a speedy recovery and ring off but these are now a minority, probably requiring protected status. The rest sadly are of what can be termed as varying degrees of insensitivity. The first is of the kind that wants to know a blow by blow account of how the fever developed and at each stage interrupting to tell you how they too had it but in a far more serious manner than yours. Theirs was pneumonia while yours is the common cold and nothing more! It shattered MMM’s ego quite a bit for he had visions of baffling doctors and getting written up about in medical journals.

The second variety, more sympathetic no doubt, is prone to dire predictions. They always have an uncle, or aunt, for let us face it these are times of gender parity, who too had the same symptoms and before you knew it were being measured for bier/coffin. A variant of this kind is the type that tries to diagnose what could be the true ailment – COVID they say and when you inform them that the tests were negative, go on to speculate about brain-eating amoeba, swine flu and sleeping sickness. They then proceeded to warn MMM on what to watch out for and suggested in an undertone that he had better write a will as well. There is a subsect here – the kind that imagines it is a doctor and freely dispenses verbal remedies, quoting pills and potions, with a fluency that can only be wondered at.

The third variety is of the kind that assumed that MMM was not really ill but merely making it an excuse to take time off. Which in their view, meant he had all the time in the world to do something for them. MMM began receiving requests that began as follows – Really sorry that you are not well but while you are at home can you please look up this reference for me? MMM chose not to respond but when pressed repeatedly politely told the person(s) to take their custom elsewhere.

Taken overall, in MMM’s view, there ought to be some etiquette lessons for people in our city on how to respond when someone is unwell. Extreme curiosity about other people’s illnesses is as much unwarranted as is the desire to offer unsolicited advice. It is an art to be concerned and yet not be intrusive and MMM hopes that more people will master it.

Now One Way, Now Two

The Man from Madras Musings has come to the conclusion that our city’s police are nothing short of wizards. They have managed to convert the narrowest of lanes into two-way roads and what is more, convinced people that they can drive through them at ease. How else can you explain the fact that traffic moves through all kinds of stretches – alleys in which, in other circumstances, no self-respecting car or bus or truck or even two-wheeler would want to be found?

But that is not the burden of the present account. What is of even greater interest is the manner in which the police switch between one-way and two-way traffic, especially on flyovers. Of course, as some have cynically observed, there is no such thing as a one way in Chennai. Traffic generally flows in all directions, rather in the manner of pieces on a chess board, only that in the game each piece has rigid rules on how it can move while in our beloved city roads anyone can move in any direction. And that includes the two and four-legged, and the two, three, four and many-wheeled as well.

But there has been one place where rules have been followed – namely on flyovers. Possibly owing to the fear of heights and the threat of being pushed over, nobody has thus far tried to go up the wrong side of flyovers. But our police, no doubt tiring of such orderliness, have decided to spice matters up. There is this flyover near where the Governor lives, where at a specific time each morning and evening, a barricade is pushed out or in, and the grade separator (that being the official name of these urban horrors we refer to as flyovers) changes from one to two-way or the other way round.

But all of this pales into insignificance when you hear about another flyover, also in the southern part of the city. This is designed with a sharp curve halfway up, then a flat and finally a ramp going down. The flat makes this flyover a record holder of sorts – it is the only elevated road in the city that waterlogs and douses those going down below. But that is nothing when compared to what has happened to the flyover in more recent times.

This was all along a one-way flyover and in fact motorists on the way up had a tendency to zoom, imagining no doubt that they were pilots taking off. That was until they were brought to a crawl by the sharp bend. Then there came a day when MMM noticed a series of small plastic rods being erected in the median of the flyover. That was the first indication that this was soon to become two-way. That of course did not prevent two-wheelers from zig-zagging through the gaps and sometimes hitting the dividers, which being of plastic were soon flattened and lying prone on the road. And there came a day when the flyover truly became two-way.

As a consequence, traffic has slowed to a crawl. But that is not the end of the story. The police keep switching between one and two-way at a whim and it is anybody’s guess as to when this flyover is in one state or the other. MMM has taken to avoiding this flyover. His pet fear is that he will be driving happily on it, only to find traffic thundering down in the opposite direction. But MMM’s fears are evidently not shared by others for the congestion on the flyover seems only to increase.

It is MMM’s view that someone senior in the police watches these switches via camera and has a hearty laugh at the chaos caused. There can be no other logic for these switches. Well, at least someone is happy!

– MMM