Sight

Its funny how people see only what they want to without actually looking ahead or even behind.

Here’s a nice example. I was coming home on my vehicle back from my classes. Coming home from Andheri station. People who have been there know what it is like. The road is shaped like a ‘T’ and the lower part of this ‘T’ ends up to the station. It’s a one way and vehicles can only leave (as I was). Now this was a festive day. ID and Good Friday.

So the roads approaching the station were blocked. Now there were loads of uncharacteristically alert traffic policemen who were trying their best to regulate the traffic. And they allowed some of the traffic on my side to move on so that I was on the brink of moving across when they suddenly asked us to stop with me at the front of the line.

Here I, like others prepared myself for a long break. Then the vehicles on my right side moved on. After that the vehicles on my left side moved on. And finally they were asked to stop by the police. So we naturally started our engines as we were eager to move on. But the police made no signal asking us to leave. That really frustrated a BEST bus driver. He began honking his horn and started gesturing towards a policeman. The policeman returned them by pointing at the traffic and holding up his hands asking him to be patient. The BEST driver then asked me to tell the policeman that I had to study and to ask him to leave us all!

The point I am trying to make here is that if the BEST driver had looked ahead (literally) he would have found that traffic that had been let off, was still at the signal (its Mumbai remember). Waiting for the ones in front of them to move on. And if we, along with the bus had been allowed to move on, we would have traveled centimeters and joined in the chaos. And blocked off other roads. And surely wasted more time than what would have been if we had been quiet and patient.

Now if the BEST driver had looked ahead (figuratively) he might have for seen what would happen. After they finally let us go, we traveled for something like 7 seconds to another halt. The road was clear, hence we covered quite a bit of it but as in most cases, it makes sense to measure length in terms of time rather than in terms of distance and its units. So we had stopped again. And we would have if that policeman had let us off earlier. It would have been a longer wait and one without having covered the distance that we had.

So short sight can be corrected by raising your chin and looking ahead.