Monday, 24 January 2022

I don't use Gordhop navigation maps while driving


I don't use Gordhop navigation maps. 

I had gone to a premium school years ago. 
I have not forgotten the Geography my school teachers taught me 45 yrs ago in the same way that I have not forgotten that to stop a car it's BRAKE and 'not' BREAK. I clearly remember that my teachers would thrash me black and blue if I would have written that one needs to TASTE the urine before TESTING rasogollas or gulab jamuns during a drive. 
I am in Kolkata but drive extensively all over the country with the same brain that God embedded into my top storey. I don't need a device or an App to tell me the route from BBD Bag to Salt Lake Stadium or Dumdum and the fanciful ETAs. I don't need a dumb screen with a moving dot/arrow while driving from Kolkata to Asansol or Delhi or Udaipur or Vizag or Khamgaon or Bargarh or Rewa. 
Faridabad has remained where it was 35 years ago as much as Vizianagram, Jeypore, Mirzapur and Keonjhar all of which have not moved an inch. At the most they have expanded or shrunk. 
For a drive from Kolkata to Varanasi I will not want people to laugh at me by proudly proclaiming that my wife or daughter was the navigator staring at a moving blue dot for the entire stretch of 680 kms. 
Way back in the 1960s/ 1970s, money in dad's pocket was very limited. One could not have imagined getting into an engineering college with even a rank of 2239 whereas present day roadies with locked social media profiles claim to be diagonal leads or vertically down leads in tech 'startups' after scoring a fantastic JEE rank of 2,32,339. The qualified uneducated techies are supposedly so tech savvy that they will leave no stones unturned to sermonize you that one should embrace technology and drive under a smooth 4 lane concrete bridge instead of driving over it because that's what the Gordhop brayed. 
When in doubt, I just need to stop and chat with a truck or cab driver by the roadside for the best route and its condition. In extreme situation, I might just switch on one of those Gordhop Maps in large and congested cities to check out the route from Mahim to Veera Desai Road or from South Extension ll to Mahipalpur, transfer the image to the device on my top storey and drive on. 

'Chena Bamuner Poiter Dorkar Pore Na'! 

Note: For the uninitiated, Gordhop (in Bengali) is @$$/ mule/ donkey.

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