Back To SG Highway

SG Highway .

It is the short form for the stretch of a four lane highway which connects Sarkhej(S) and Gandhinagar (G), so it is the SG highway.Well for a normal traveller this would be normal stretch of road,nothing extraordinary about it, just another work of NHAI .

For me it was the same when I first drove down or rather was driven down by one one of those yellow buses of Nirma University ,this is where Nirma has done a good job i think ,everything related to Nirma must have a shade of yellow somewhere  and same goes with the buses.Now if I see A Yellow Bus I only think of Nirma.

Anyways so there I was on the SG Highway for the first time, there was a group of eight to ten of us , here to pursue the PG course of MBA . It was 22 June 2005, somewhere around 6.00 pm.

Yesterday I had come back ,the day is 29th March 2007, the two years of MBA are over , we are here for the convocation  and I am driving down the SG Highway again as I had done almost everyday in the last two years. With me was one of my dear friends Shekhar “Bookie ” Ruparelia , I know he will make faces when he reads this, actually this is the first time I have used the term for this gentleman , he is a great bookie, no he does not have to do anything with cricket betting he just is in love with the books he reads.

It was 9.45 pm and we were heading towards a very successful food chain which sells u easy fat, it goes by the name Mc Donald’s, the one which has a joker sitting in front of it. I had come back from home the same afternoon and then ironically I said “This feels like home …”  my friend replied ” this actually is home”.

So SG Highway, why is it home? It has Nirma on it of course but in the two years we spent here, our life had revolved around this highway. If we had to eat we would go to one of the restaurants situated on this long stretch, there were many to choose from , in all the price categories and shapes and sizes. They started from our own dhaba called Rajasthan to MNCs like Pizza Hut. And we being very meticulous with our living habits were in constant need of food and groceries, for that we had the Big B  or Big Bazaar again on SG Highway. For a person like me and most of the others this stretch of 15 odd kilometers was the heart of Ahmedabad city though actually most of it was not even under the jurisdiction of the city’s municipal corporation and that just about sums up the importance of this stretch road which will now stay in our memories forever.

So when I leave on 4th April I may be travelling on this stretch for the last time or may be not. However if whenever I would come back this stretch of road will always feel like home.

In the meantime the highway is going to be the same, vehicles of all the sizes will continue to ply nonchalantly on it as for them it is just another stretch of road.