Poles Apart 

What’s there in a pole? I mean the electric poles doubling as lamp posts dotting the sides of streets.  A closer look might offer an answer. You might find a Wanted Ad or a PG Accommodation ad hanging from it only to be amused by the free media poles provide to those unabashed advertisers. Look at the bottom of any pole. There’s garbage encircling it, dutifully dumped by the artful litterers as if it is manure meant to nourish the pole.  Moreover, the stinking garbage covers the nauseating stench of urine lying beneath, as the bottom of the pole is used by the four-legged as a guidepost and the two-legged male species pass it for a public urinal.

Yes, in India, even poles are not left alone. In a country where loners and lunatics are hardly differentiated as such, finding a vacant land, as well as an unblemished pole, is quite challenging. In a way, it is akin to the so-called ‘kalpavruksha’ that the coconut tree is. Since a pole benefits the Indiankind in more ways than one, that nourishing part alluded to in the first paragraph is not totally unfair.  

Again if two poles face one another on either side of a street, it is a Godsend for those looking for hoisting banners, only that it calls for some daring act on behalf of those ‘poltergeists’ for whom defacing public places is their birthright.

   It may be a banner welcoming a goon in the guise of a boon to the society, for the inauguration of a festival at a place of worship wherein decibel is a measure of devotion or it may also be about the launch of a new eatery or a protest march, event, and so on. To add insult to injury, the poles and the general public populated by mobile poles, grin and bear it when the poltergeists give no two hoots about removing the banner past the event. The banner is allowed to die a natural death. Euthanasia is ruled out. Come monsoon, a gale would claim the banner by knocking it down dead on the road, testifying to the civic sense buried alive long before.

The two words ‘poll’ and ‘pole’ are polls… oops…poles apart! They are one of the nightmares a transcriber has to cope with. A moment’s distraction may cost one his/her job since a spell check may otherwise okay poll typed as a pole and vice versa.

Yet a poll and a pole are not as poles apart as they appear to be. When polls are around the corner, poles are exploited to the hilt. Though poles erected on the shaky ground of corrupt practices often stand as ominously mimicking the Pisa tower, we wake up to the threats they pose, only after they fall on an unsuspecting human head or a stray dog, or a cow.

It’s my ill fate that the specter of a twisted pole would keep propping up for life whenever I come across a pole. Call it the sleigh of His invisible hand, that day I had reached home late only to find the main road leading to my home plunged into darkness and utter chaos, flooded by people and clueless onlookers on sideways. With the hopes of reaching my home dashed, I parked my bike on a lane as most did and hesitatingly joined the crowd. On enquiring the ones more in the know, I was told that a BMTC bus had hit a girl enjoying paani poori her evening snack at the roadside shop, killing her on the spot. The bus came to a halt only on hitting an electric pole next. Had I reached home earlier that evening I would have stepped out from home into the same road more or less the time the accident took place. If so I would not have been alive to write this.

The twisted pole bearing testimony to the gory accident remained there for a couple of days. Until I came to know that the driver, an epileptic, had a seizure that fateful evening, even when on wheels, and hence caused the accident, I suspected he had nurtured an unfounded bias against the poles and, the life of the girl the accident had claimed was just a collateral damage.