There are many ways to respond to a new expressway. You can measure its length, its engineering, its economic impact, or the hours it shaves off a weary journey. Or you can stand at the median, squint into the distance, and ask – what is the hurry? Ravish Kumar has chosen the latter.
The reduction of travel time from eleven hours to six is, for most people, a straightforward gain. Five hours reclaimed – from fatigue, from uncertainty, from the blazing sun, from the small indignities of bad roads – is not an abstraction.
It is time that can be spent earning, resting, meeting family, or simply not being stuck between two towns with a punctured tyre and fading patience.
Time saved is time wasted
But there exists a peculiar school of thought that treats time saved as time wasted. If you reach earlier, the argument goes, what will you do with the surplus? It is a question that sounds philosophical until you realise it is merely rhetorical – designed not to probe, but to dismiss.
By this logic, progress itself is suspect. Faster trains, better highways, efficient airports – all stand accused of creating an excess of time that citizens are apparently unqualified to handle.
One is tempted to ask whether the same standard applies elsewhere. If a surgery takes two hours instead of six, should the patient complain of arriving too early at recovery? If a salary is credited on the first of the month rather than the tenth, is the inconvenience of early liquidity duly acknowledged?
Lower logistics costs
The modern economy runs, quite inconveniently for this argument, on efficiency. Time saved translates into lower logistics costs, quicker movement of goods, better connectivity between markets, and, most importantly, predictability.
For a truck driver, it means an extra trip in a week. For a small trader, it means fresher produce reaching a distant mandi. For a family, it means not having to start at dawn to arrive by dusk. None of this is romantic. And that is perhaps the problem.
There is a nostalgia here – not for better times, but for slower ones. The bullock cart has its place in poetry and postcards, but it is an odd benchmark for national infrastructure. The world has moved on, not because it is impatient, but because it has choices.
Pay a little, save a lot
It is also worth noting that the objection to tolls, raised with great solemnity, is less an insight and more a universal truth. Roads of this nature, anywhere in the world, are rarely built and maintained for free. The transaction is simple – pay a little, save a lot. Time, after all, is not just money; it is opportunity.
And then there is the small matter of summer. Five hours saved is not merely a statistic in such conditions – it is five fewer hours under a punishing sun, five fewer hours of fatigue, dehydration, and risk. The expressway is not just about speed; it is about reducing endurance.
The more interesting question is not why a citizen would want to reach five hours earlier. It is why someone would insist that they should not.
Criticism is necessary in a democracy. Infrastructure projects deserve scrutiny – on cost, on quality, on environmental impact. But when the critique begins and ends with a philosophical discomfort about arriving too soon, it risks sounding less like analysis and more like aversion.
There is a quiet irony in all this. The same platforms that amplify such arguments depend entirely on speed – of transmission, of access, of response. A slower internet, one suspects, would not be defended with equal enthusiasm.
The country, meanwhile, will continue to build, pave, and connect. People will continue to choose shorter routes over longer ones. Not because they are in a hurry for its own sake, but because they value what lies at the end of the journey – and the time they did not have to lose getting there.
Some will still prefer the scenic route of delay. That is their right. Ravish Kumar may take the slower lane. The rest will take the expressway.
