Of good roads

Published December 18, 2012

Of late I have been travelling across Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa mostly by road. These roads are a joy to drive on. Recently I went from Islamabad to Peshawar on M-1 and returned in the evening. It rained all the way.

I could not help but notice that all the rain drops would fall on the screen, flatten out, convert into a sphere and because of the car speed would travel from the bottom of the wind screen to the roof top smoothly. These hundreds of water droplets would then convert into colourless Tadpoles with a spherical head and a long watery tail.

The M-1 road between Peshawar and Islamabad is probably the best I have travelled in Pakistan so far. The smoothness of the road can be measured by the fact that these hundreds of tadpoles would maintain their perfect vertically trajectory without anyone of them overtaking or colliding with the other. Since there are no bumps on the road, no tadpole jumps over its predecessor. Same would probably be true for M-2.

It has been exactly 15 years since M-2 was built. One hopes to see similar roads in Balochistan and Sindh where other Pakistanis can enjoy tadpoles on their windscreens during the rain.

S. NAYYAR IQBAL RAZA Karachi

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