Few protest poems begin by admitting how weak the protesters look. Balachandran V's "Life in a Fast Lane" opens with a shrug of honesty: "To be honest, we looked so pathetic." The speaker belongs to a "raggedly line of people / Not more than fifteen," holding placards beside a busy road where old trees have just been felled. The central idea comes only at the very end, but the whole poem leads to it. The faster we build roads to get somewhere, the further we move from the ground that sustains us.
The opening stanza spends its energy on a single image. The felled trees leave "uprooted roots like / Splayed innards of a roadkill." The simile turns timber into flesh, so the roadside becomes the scene of an accident, or a killing. It also anticipates the poem's later verb, "savaged," which belongs to animals and attacks. Even the dust that "swirled" feels like the aftermath of violence. The protesters are "disheveled" and the street is a mess, and the poem makes no attempt to dignify either.
The second stanza gives the protesters their words, and the verbs climb: "We said," "We asked," "We cried." Their appeals move from a calm statement ("the trees are our heritage") to a challenge ("how dare you cut what you did not plant?") to something close to a plea. The best line is the last: "how can this cool shade cast a shadow / On your way to progress?" Shade and shadow are nearly the same thing, yet one comforts and the other obstructs. The question exposes how absurd it is to treat shelter as an obstacle.
The response is pure indifference, and the poem shows it through movement. Drivers "honked us to the brim of the ditches," pushing the protesters to the edge of the road and of the argument. The ditches are where "once the roots had embraced the earth," and the word "embraced" gives the trees a tenderness that the traffic lacks. The "tinted glass" is both a literal barrier and a moral one: the drivers can see out, but nobody can see in. Their mockery is brief, and they are "Forgetting us in the next instant." The forgetting is as quick as the cars, so speed becomes a way of not paying attention.
In the last stanza the voice changes. "We" gives way to "They," and the past tense gives way to prediction. Free verse suits the shift, since the poem has no rhyme and its lines vary in length. The argument builds by accumulation instead: "Trees, then paddy fields / Hills, then mountainsides / Ponds, then streams." Each pair is short and matter-of-fact, which makes the loss seem routine and inevitable. The mention of paddy fields suggests a landscape where farming and forest still sit close to the city, and the dateline names Trivandrum, though the poem never leans on that detail. Its warning applies to any place where roads keep widening.
The ending turns on a quiet paradox. The builders act "In the hope they can reach faster," but the sentence never says where they are going, as if the destination no longer matters. Then comes the deflating "When, actually," which sounds like a correction in an argument, and the final lines: "they are only / Distancing themselves / From the earth." The word "earth" has been working through the poem, first embraced by roots, then savaged, and finally left behind.
The title now looks different. "Life in a fast lane" usually suggests thrill and ambition, but here it is a life lived at a speed that cannot notice what it destroys. What makes the poem significant is its refusal to flatter its own side. The protesters do not win, and they are not even noticed. Their failure becomes the evidence, and the poem reads as a record of what a hurried world prefers not to see.