Who needs roads when there's air?

One cannot but be in awe of Nitin Gadkari's borderline genius. Borderline, because he's got an off-the-charts idea without outlining any timeline or providing technical details. His latest pitch to unclog city traffic is not more asphalt but less of it: aerial pod-based transit, electric vertical take-off and landing contraptions - pushpak vimanas, no less. The man whose day job is to get potholes fixed proposes to simply soar over them. All this reminds us of Elon Musk. Elonji's 2013 white paper on 'Hyperloop Alpha' imagines capsules gliding at near-supersonic speeds through vacuum tubes, carrying both passengers and freight. It promises collision-free, weather-proof travel at 2x speed of planes. Sounds very Gadkarian, actually.

Both men, in their own way, are prophets of escape. Gadkari wants us to levitate above India's battered highways. Musk wants to burrow beneath California's clogged freeways. One is a minister of roads who dreams of flight. The other, a carmaker who dreams of tubes that don't necessarily go to space. But the minister may have a better chance of making his seemingly fantastical plan a reality than his private sector American counterpart. One, we, as a society, are more attuned to plans, especially fantastical ones. Two, who doesn't want to believe a government man who promises us a bypass above terrestrial chaos?