COLOMBO, Sri Lanka -- Hot on the heels of their pottery exhibition in early April and the bullock cart protest just last week, United Pachyderms have announced an unconventional sound and light show at high noon on Tuesday, the 3rd of June.
At the appointed hour, motorists across the island are expected to bring their vehicles to a complete stop in the middle of the road and protest against the rising cost of fuel by tooting their horns and flashing their lights for five minutes. At first glance this might seem, for lack of a better word, unsound. Had the aforementioned horns not been tooted and lights not been flashed, the net energy consumption around noon on Tuesday might in fact be less. Thus, one is compelled to conclude that this elephantine protest would not be very green.
However, closer scrutiny suggests a far more fiendish design behind this madness. Let us digress momentarily to the Big Apple. The shortest unit of time know to the human race[1] is understood to be the New York second, sometimes called the taxi second. This is defined as the period of time between the light turning green on a Manhattan street and the cabbie behind you hitting his horn. Over time this has become a Pavlovian response, so much so that taxi drivers in New York honk their horns when the light turns green even in the absence of vehicles in front of them.
Back in tropical Colombo, all motorists are New York taxi driver equivalent and will honk their horns and flash their lights should a gnat fart two blocks away. In this context, the sheer deviousness of this latest pachydermal production becomes obvious. Motorists stopping their vehicles for no good reason will cause a massive chain reaction of irritated honking and flashing punctuated by appropriate vocalizations, hand gestures and even fisticuffs. Those who do not wish to protest would be forced to seethe and fume in silence as even the slightest toot would add to the chaos. The amount of time required to clear the resultant gridlock is left as an exercise to the reader.
Have the pachyderms got something right for once? Will their protest fall on deaf ears? Will it cause profound deafness? Will the price of fuel plummet like a budget airline on a wet lease? Will it create a persistent traffic jam of the sort encountered in Lutetia in Asterix and the Banquet[2]? Your guess is as good as ours.
Stay tuned as we bring you the latest in this developing story.
[1] The shortest unit of time known is actually the Planck time, defined as the time taken in seconds for a photon traveling at the speed of light to cross a distance of one Planck length. This works out to 5.39121 x 10-44 seconds, but is believed to be considerably less interesting than the New York second.
[2] Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, Asterix and the Banquet, Revised (Orion, 2004).
1 comment:
Aha... This is an ingenious idea. What a great way to protest the rising cost of fuel. Although, would the noise really make any difference in Colombo? Or maybe some one came up with this idea 15 years ago and people have been protesting eversince. But I must say, I do prefer the nudie runs as a form of protest, much better (depending on who is running of course). but thats from a personal perspective... nothing to do with an effective protest. Hmmm..
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