A lot of people I know have an amazing road sense. Me, I was born without an internal GPS. If you stand me in a spot, blindfold me, and spin me around a couple of times, I won't know which way to turn (I'll probably stagger around drukenly for a few seconds, puke all over myself, and faint). People like me depend heavily on signage, landmarks, and auto drivers to get us to where we're going without crossing into the next state. But, it's not just my road sense, I'm hopeless at finding anything at all (which is why I'm not married); I couldn't spot a dancing moose in a discotheque because I wouldn't find the discotheque to begin with - even if one of those colored disco balls fell on my head.
One-way streets is a good concept but it can be terrifying for someone who has a great propensity to get lost because if you take the wrong road, there's literally no turning back and instead of going where you need to go, you'll end up going where the road takes you. (I'm better than my mom though - she once drove around a circle thrice before she realized she was going round and round.)
So if I have to go to a place which I haven't been to before, I usually do a recce the previous day. Problem is, it seems like I've never been to any place before - even the ones I've been to before. Which is how I set out to establish where the Government Arts and Science College is. I found the college but I didn't know I'd found it because it didn't have a board that said it was the Government Arts and Science College and it had been found; of course, all you had to do was to look at it to know it was a college but I need more proof - I need a board that proclaims what it is before you'll convince me and to my bad luck there was no board. And worse, now I had to find my way back home through the maze of one-ways. I simply kept following the road for 15 minutes without knowing where I was going.
I finally gave up and pulled up next to an auto driver and asked him "which way to Domlur?"
He looked at me like I'd asked him "Which way to Africa?" Then he giggled and pointed down the road and said, "Follow that road till you come to a U-turn, take the U-turn and go back to where you came from."
Very helpful.
"But where did I come from?" I asked him.
I think he wanted to say "I hope you don't want me to answer that," but he changed his mind and shrugged as if to say "anywhere you want it to be."
I peered at boards (the signage has really improved in the city) from which all kinds of names flew at me, some familiar ("so THAT's the railway station!") but mostly not. To cut a long story short, I followed the familiar sounding names and landed up in front of my aunt's house which is a good 10 kms from home but it was still home - it was lunchtime by now, I was hungry and tired and happy.
Life's like that - you suddenly realize you're on the wrong road but whaddya know, it's a one-way stret, so you keep going, and you stumble around following familiar sign boards guided by an inner intuition only to rediscover your faith in serendipity.
