3 days ago
- Climate
- New Indian Express
When a flat tyre took me closer to ‘Young India'
I wish to share a heart-warming incident my wife and I recently experienced. On May 25, we were returning to the city after dropping our son at the Kochi international airport.
The IMD had warned of a stormy night. By 9pm, we were indeed witness to it — furious splashes of rain cascading down the windshield. In spite of the wipers' valiant effort, visibility on that busy stretch of the highway was reduced to mere yards.
Though, as a youth, I had once harboured a Wordsworthian wish to stand and stare at nature's fury, that night I had but one singular wish: to support my co-passenger's understandable wariness of the treacherous thoroughfare.
Suddenly, a flash, a thunder. But my experienced hands on the wheel realised — it was not thunder alone. Pulling over at a dark alley confirmed my fear: a flat tyre.
As I broke the news to my better half, it brought back memories of a night years ago when, stranded in a similar alley (albeit without a storm), I had changed a flat tyre of our two-wheeler with both our children on board. But time weakens not only the body but the resolve too. The will to even lift the spare tyre seemed to have ebbed.
Confronted with those old anxieties, what unfolded next felt like a vision I had long held for our country. A Tagorean dream of a young India.
Without being overly dramatic, let me describe the event that followed. This occurred just a few yards from the Pullinchode signal junction in Aluva.
