India, Sept. 21 -- Nobody cares for the feelings of a road. With each pothole on the highways, every single traffic jam in the city, and every has-been trail-like shadow in the hills, a road gets cursed and vilified. An angry "yeh wala road hi kharaab hai" (this road itself is bad) outburst is the most benign of them. What if the road isn't the villain, but the tragic hero in our collective drama of dysfunction? After all, the road doesn't spit paan. It doesn't jump red lights or double park in the neatly encroached space outside houses. The potholed, chaotic, crime-infested, rage-inducing mess isn't the fault of a surface. It's perhaps a symptom of a deeper national malaise: A chronic, criminal and unapologetic lack of civic sense. A young IPS trainee recently asked my advice - no, I did nothing to deserve this honour - on one thing that India needed fixed urgently for its dream drive to development. Between the bites of croissant, I could only mumble, "Roads. Fix our roads". A 2022 study by the National Academies in Washington DC, on pedestrian behaviour in India revealed that around "44.6% of pedestrians arriving during red light, violate it" owing to long wait times, impatience, perceived low risk, and low adherence to enforcement. In the same year, a Kerala-centric study published in Heritage and Society reinforced the Broken Windows theory by suggesting that people are more likely to misuse or show less care towards neglected public spaces. Welcome to the Indian version of nihilism. If the world is already meaningless and ruined, what's one more empty packet of chips clogging the drains and causing the "inevitable" floods? Another study conducted in Chennai suggested that people apparently intend not to litter, but then do it anyway. In Delhi, this author recently witnessed the shaming of a woman who accosted a litterer. The latter and her companion kept jeering at the brave woman who didn't think it was "normal" to throw a banana peel out of the ladies' compartment, hoping it would miraculously reach a dustbin. Clearly, we revel in the shared cultural belief that public space is someone else's responsibility. The road is not "ours". It's the government's. It's the municipality's. It's karma's. Anyone's but ours. And roads, we don't even treat them as public infrastructure. They are our unpaid interns, to be exploited and rewarded, if at all, only with platitudes and empty graces. Our roads are blessed year-round with a variety of divine benedictions. Roads are the site of religious processions and events, and even weekly prayers and darshans. They gallantly receive the offerings - flowers, foods, festoons - and never complain about the pegged tents right in their middle. Yet, there is no deliverance in sight for them. They stay condemned. What we lack in civic sense, we make up for in improvisational chaos. Crossing an Indian road is not so much an act of transportation as it is performance art - a cosmic dance of auto-rickshaws, cows, bicycles, that one guy who always walks diagonally while talking loudly on his phone, and another who's shadowing him to snatch the same phone. Or a gold chain. The pandemonium of honking, jaywalking, sexual harassment, and whatnot gets blamed on the poor road. As if the road dug its own pothole, which is not the bequest of a corrupt contractor. As if the speed breaker was put there by the devil himself, not by an urban planner who spent college years doing everything but learning how to construct good roads. Cities and roads are supposed to be soulmates, but our roads resemble the acid burns left on a woman's face by a jilted lover. Every new flyover is a case study in urban Darwinism. We must either adapt or die. Traffic fatalities get talked about only when the aim is to bring a politician or party down. The Global Road Safety Facility (GRSF) under the World Bank has found that in low- and middle-income countries, road traffic injuries and fatalities cost the GDP between 2 and 6%. Another study suggests low governance quality combined with certain cultural traits (e.g. higher "hierarchy", "mastery" and lesser "intellectual autonomy") tends to result in higher traffic fatality rates. Maybe, then, an Indian road is not a flaw but a mirror. God made Man in His own image; we make and remake roads in ours: Punishing, dramatic, and full of garbage....