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The word ‘straight’, used literally or figuratively, evokes a varied response ranging from “oh no, not again” to “oh, so nice,” largely depending upon the occasion.
My PT teachers in primary, middle, and high schools seemed obsessed with the benefits of being straight, posture-wise. The collective anthem of PT teachers everywhere seemed to be: “Why aren’t you serious? Not sitting straight eventually bends your back like a bow, causing permanent spinal damage! Holding your body weight on one leg or shifting it often from one leg to the other while standing will cause you to stand cross-hipped, resulting in walking with swaying hips! That strains your whole structure! So, always sit straight, stand straight, be straight, and you will automatically walk straight!”
While growing up, we were told to always take a straight path! The crux of all such lessons was: “Never take a ‘galat’ or crooked ‘raasta’!”. We listened with an apparently serious face, inwardly feeling, “Oh, come on, we know all about it!”
It’s not always that the word straight causes indifference; it occasionally thrilled us and made us immensely thankful! That was whenever we were driving in unknown territories of Karnataka or Tamil Nadu where signboards were ambiguous at best and missing altogether at worst, and we sought directions from strangers, who sometimes replied, “Seeeeda hogi” in Kannada or “Straightttt pongo” in Tamil, meaning we should go straight! It was so much easier to follow and proceed compared to other times when somebody told us “to go left” while pointing their hand to the right, and vice versa!
Incidentally, there is another angle to the word ‘straight’ in social circles, but I am not dwelling on it here!
All these crossed my mind recently while reading a report in DH that stated straight roads had been responsible for 67 per cent of annual road accidents! For crying out loud, is driving on straight roads that dangerous? But then I remembered my trip with family and friends from Belgavi to Kolhapur a long time ago. We were passing through a long stretch of road that was unbelievably straight. I had to struggle to stay awake and alert, having hardly anything to do with clutch, gears, brake, horn, or steering, and maintaining a steady 100 kmph while my co-passengers were blissfully dozing off! Now compare it to the ‘hard drive’ we suffer daily on Bengaluru roads! Aren’t we blessed by the absence of monotony and the necessity to be invariably on high alert? One is tempted to conclude that roads that are not straight are perhaps safer, after all!