Narrow roads and over sized politician motorcades

Sunday evening, I was driving back to Chandigarh from Delhi. We stopped over at Karnal for dinner. It was getting late. We wanted to get back on road quickly. We gulped down our dinner and jumped back in the car. I was counting on reaching home in an hour and a half.

As the chance would have it, I drove for couple kilometers and up infront of me was a motorcade. It had big cars, SUVs, security jeeps and what gave it away was the trademark ambassadors. They all had bright red light on them. Obviously a politician was being driven. From the registration plates I figured that it must have been a Haryana minister's motorcade. That meant that the motorcade will go till Chandigarh, the capital. The rear end of the motorcade was being brought up by a security jeep. I tried to overtake the motorcade and this jeep blocked my way. The security chap waived frantically, signalling that I must not dare overtake. I was a mere citizen of the country, how could I even think of overtaking Mr politician, who was being driven at 65 km/hour, even though I wanted to drive at permissible 90 km an hour on NH1!

Soon, besides me, there were a bunch of other cars jostling to overtake the motorcade but could not! Now and then a new car would overtake the rest of the ordinary cars only to hit the politician wall and fall back.

I was following an over sized motorcade, that was transporting, as far as I know, a necessary evil, a politician, at a speed what was well below the legal permissible speed on NH1. It reminded me of the situation in our country. Incapable and incompetent people sitting right at the top are acting as bottlenecks. They have put leash on the energy, creativity and potential of an entire nation. These folks are not capable of moving fast and have thus reduced the speed of the entire nation. The situation is worse at the state level.

Anyhow, that was the situation I was caught in. There was no way that I could overtake the motorcade and would have had to drive at the speed of 65 Km/hr or less till my destination. But that was not acceptable. I realized that at Ambala cant, the motorcade will go over the elevated NH and if I break off from the motorcade at that point and drive fast enough on the surface street, such that I join back the NH ahead of the motorcade, then I stood a chance to beat it! My attempt at the Ambala cant flyover was not successful, the surface street was too crowded for me to beat the motorcade, as I tried to get on the NH, I ran into the motorcade. It had beaten me to take the lead again.

I knew there was another flyover coming, this was Ambala city flyover. While the motorcade took the flyover, I took the surface street, the traffic was less. Couple places I had to actually blow my horn like crazy for the vehicles to get out of my way. This flyover was longer than the previous, this allowed me a longer stretch over which I could attempt to overtake the motorcade. At the place where surface street met the NH, I came just ahead of the pilot car. I had finally broken free!