India, Sept. 20 -- Nobody cares for the feelings of a road. With each pothole on the highways, every single traffic jam in the city, and every has-been trail-like shadow in the hills, a road gets cursed and vilified. An angry "yeh wala road hi kharaab hai" (this road itself is bad) outburst is the most benign of them.

What if the road isn't the villain, but the tragic hero in our collective drama of dysfunction? After all, the road doesn't spit paan. It doesn't jump red lights or double park in the neatly encroached space outside houses. The potholed, chaotic, crime-infested, rage-inducing mess isn't the fault of a surface. It's perhaps a symptom of a deeper national malaise: A chronic, criminal and unapologetic lack of civic sense.

A y...