The Chaos Club - my article in Times of India dated 23 June 2013

This was the article as it appeared in the newspaper

As I drive around Vizag, I am quite convinced that there is a shadowy group of experts, secretly meeting in an underground control centre somewhere, to work out how to create complete chaos on Vizag roads. They sit in a dimly lit room, around a table, faces lit up by large monitors showing road maps and traffic data. They are busy working out how to design roads to create daily disorder, continuous confusion, terrible turmoil, permanent pandemonium, maximum mayhem and … well you get the point.  Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the secret underground “Chaos Club”.

This club, comprising members of local administration, which I cannot name due to the secret nature of their work, has succeeded in permanently fouling up traffic at the infamous Gajuwaka, NAD Kotha Road and Sathyam junctions. They have ensured that those junctions will drive drivers crazy in perpetuity.

At Aseelmetta this secret group has ensured that our tax money goes into this mystical “flyover to nowhere”, a project that has become a permanent work in progress. I am confident that by the time it finishes the Chaos Club will have figured out how to add the element of chaos into one or both ends or in the middle of the fly-over to inflict a large dose of misery to the road user.

This club, in a major coup, have unleashed thousands of “Auto-Bots” into the city. And you thought that they were plain auto rickshaws? These “Auto-bots” crowd the RTC, Dwarakanagar and Diamond Park areas to completely foul up the traffic. Hundreds of them lurk under the “flyover to nowhere” entering the roads suddenly to inflict maximum pain. Like the National Geographic Channel’s hunting lions (the autos) they cut off the poor gazelles (the pedestrians) before devouring them. These scary auto-bots are linked to each other by advanced and still unexplained communication systems that tell individual auto drivers how to collectively and optimally block maximum traffic. I am told that the system is a case study in Harvard’s chaos theory class.

One of the greatest achievements of the “Chaos Club” is at the Swarna Bharati junction.  By clever and ambiguous positioning of the roads and the absence of police or traffic lights, they have ensured that vehicles coming from Bullaya College are confronted by vehicles on the Rama Talkies road on a trajectory of collision. It is an excruciating delight (go figure) to see vehicles of all types manoeuvring at this junction, each making seemingly suicidal moves or displaying blatant bluster. Might is usually right here. Two wheelers stop for cars, cars shy away from SUVs, and every one quivers at the site of the APSRTC busses. Pedestrians, the bottom most link in the food chain, are free game for all. Knock them down; run them over … after all it’s their fault for daring to walk on the road. Now as a pièce de résistance the BRTS track runs through the road. This ultimate killer move has sealed the fate of this junction forever.

Another feather in the Chaos Club’s hat is the intersection between the unnamed road coming from Meghalaya Hotel and meeting the Sampath Vinayak temple road. Designed by pure evil genius, vehicles coming up from Meghalaya side are forced to confront vehicles on Sampath Vinayaka road going down to Aseelmetta causing bountiful bedlam. Add to that the thousands of kids trying to cross the road on their way to schools and colleges every day and you have traffic conditions that deserve the Nobel Prize for Chaos.

I have mentioned just a few examples of this secret society’s commendable contribution to chaos. All over city they have worked hard to foster complex conditions of traffic chaos. It is indeed a work of pure evil genius and their efforts must be recognized. But no one knows who they are or where they operate from. Hail to the Chaos Club, Vizag’s very own genuinely successful secret organisation.