This is the age of GPS. But if you drive like me, you can still miss the route. You overshoot a crucial turning due to a minor lapse in concentration. Your phone does not chide you, but being infinitely patient, “re-routes” you. And now you can’t believe the squiggly new route you see on the GPS, like noodles gone berserk. Too many lanes have sprouted, and there is the possibility of going in the opposite direction on a one-way street and getting fined by the traffic police. The GPS perversely seems to show the direction exactly opposite to what you have in mind. Or you have encountered digging work across the road that seems to have started only an hour ago and is not reflected on your GPS. You are truly lost, now.
So it is back to asking passers-by the route, the old-fashioned way. It is almost a thumb rule that at any crucial road junction where you are not sure where to turn, there will be no benign and leisurely passer-by within accosting distance from whom you can seek directions. The area will be deserted, potential direction-givers go into hiding, and vehicles speed past you with the drivers resolutely not looking in your direction. The only solution is to get down from your vehicle and walk up to a nearby shop and ask for directions. The shopkeeper will see it as a challenge, having sat there for 10 years or more. He will rattle off directions that involve 10 difficult turns, a key u-turn, a no-entry board you should watch out for, flyovers you should not go on top of, and so on. He does not realise that in your confusion, you can only remember only the first two turns he has mentioned. So you thank him and walk away, repeating to yourself the first two turns like a mantra, hoping to ask someone else when you are done turning twice.
Sometimes, in a reversal of the situation, you are walking along in your area, and someone driving by halts and asks you for directions. You do so in a fashion eerily similar to the shopkeeper you derided earlier, and after the direction-seeker has gone away, you feel you could have done better. And you begin to rehearse a smarter way of indicating directions in your area.
When a new visitor to the area approaches a group of people for directions, the group hierarchy suffers an imbalance since everyone pitches in with his “better” way. There is a bit of a competition to be the expert direction-giver. During this time, if any random passer-by butts in and gives a clearer direction, he is trespassing and invites resentment for putting the group down in the esteem of the visitor.
If you are the direction-giver, you feel a sense of self-worth if you have given succinct directions, along with the mildly pleasant surprise that someone thinks you know something they don’t. On the other hand, if you waffle and blabber, you feel bad afterwards, wondering whether you could have given better and crisper and surer directions. What is the use, you feel, of living in an area of a town if you can’t even give clear directions, can’t readily recollect the street names or landmarks for precise instructions?
Even more pitiably, after you have given directions, you shout out some more clarifications when the visitor is walking away. Later on, in a moment of introspection, you realise that among many other things you don’t know, you also have no clue which is north, south, east or west.
Giving clear directions is akin to describing at short notice what you do for a living, or about how you spend time, or what you are all about. It has the potential to shake up your sense of identity, about where you are and where you are heading, and not appear adrift and rootless, as you search for the apt words to package your life and current habitat for the others’ comprehension, and in the process find anchorage and certainty in your own life.
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