The American highway

The highway is long and winding.....its an interstate that according to uncited and unchecked conspiratorial brains, were desgined to be straight enough for nuclear armed planes to land and take off during the cold war. I bet that you need a plane to land vertically on this highway. It was nice and pretty in the couple of afternoon hours that the sun hung up there. The sun...it was nothing more than the size of a quarter, as dim as a fully lit moon. The woods, to copy Frost...were lovely, dark and deep, covered with frost and mist and all those symptoms of late autumn. I like the word autumn, it echoes much longer ...reflecting and giving a taste of the beauty, of the wind coloured by the falling leaves and the golden sun.I hate to use 'fall' to describe it.Its a word- american in body and soul. Shortened to save time,typewriter ribbons and telephone conversations. Autumn, nature's last dance before the white winter monochrome sets in.

Its early evening if you are an Indian, but late afternoon if you are american. Its very dark now...the sun snuffed by the gnawing winter and the rain. The rain is not heavy, its just a spiteful drizzle. Its probably icy cold. From where I sit, I see it only in the persistence of the windscreen wipers and in the dipping lights of the weekend traffic-wierding and snaking its way,away from city life and its cancerous existence.

The weekend traffic rumbles on, to find a place they call home, out in the deep dark woods. They ride the american road-ambition, innovation and the free market.Free to buy, to sell and to get up and run to places they wonna go. I hope I dont ever need my forgiveness, but I am on this road.This is America, the land of confusion-the land where Hunter S. Thomson is god and Robert Frost is feared and loathed.This is the land where speech is free but everything else costs.There is an Indian driver, with a North Indian accent thats driving this bus. Welcome to the land of nylon, dreams and the first amendment.

The rain is transmogrified to sleet now. I like calvin.Its the sketch of america, a nation we all ape. America is a nation, that to quote another mass manufacturer of such lines, knows the cost of everything, but many a times, the value of nothing.

note: My views in this essay are influenced by my limited experiences here,my patience and the silly undergraduate in the seat next to me who is testing my patience with three hours of non-stop gossip. I hope that either I get where I am going soon or that her battery fails, or her voice dies!