Immortality feat. Bureaucracy

What is “Immortality”? Simple, getting a road named after you. But not just any road. A busy road.

You may deem it to be obvious. But it isn’t. I assure you. There is a secret ingredient which is missing. Without which immortality is not possible.

See, the immortality is not a function of how busy the road is. Busy here being a proxy of commuter volume passing through that road which implies a certain importance of the road. Both in conjunction are assumed to lead to a constant recollect and recall factor across the population for the person after whom the road is named. It usually does. But it doesn’t make one immortal. It’s more like knowing about Tata, Birla, Ambani etc. - you know about it and once in a while talk about it when it’s in the news but that’s about it.

To be truly remembered, there should be an emotional underlying the remembrance. And that’s where the secret missing ingredient comes in - the bureaucracy or in this case the municipal corporation. It’s their constant sprinkling of constant work across the road which creates a lot of inconvenience (remember - “Work in Progress. Inconvenience is Regretted”) for the commuters and thus, a painful remembrance which embeds anything related to it in the brain. And that’s where the name of the person after whom the road is named gets wired into our neural networks and thus, becoming a part of the normal thought traffic. You remember it recurringly. It means something to you. It has been internalized.

You see, bureaucracy has its benefits. Even “Immortality” needs for them to exist.

Reviews

[Matthew Daalling]

That's really good. I found the piece to be funny. I chuckled through it thanks for the effort sir. Really well done.