At Jagdishpur, a small industrial town just inside Amethi, a branch in the narrow road, choked until now with trucks, buses and tractors, takes you into the fields.
Visibility is now limited to a few tree branches around each ominous bend in the road.
Howard Johnson, Days Inn and Holiday Inn had cookie-cutter branches just up the road, but I felt at ease in my plebeian surroundings.
Crops had been smashed to the ground, branches lay across the road, you could smell the earth in the air and I felt totally inspired.
I was driving with an Israeli journalist to Har Gilo, an Israeli settlement south of Jerusalem, when we came to an Israeli checkpoint at a fork in the road; one branch went to Jerusalem and the other to the Arab village of Vallaje.
Decisions are explicitly at the forks in the road or branching of the tree.
One of Joint Publishing's largest branches, in Queen's Road Central, proves the point.
If you think of it as a journey, imagine yourself standing at a fork in the road, only in this case there are three different roads branching in front of you.
Bidar is reached by northward branches of the roads and rail lines between Hyderabad and Mumbai in Maharashtra state.
This is the 25th branch, just across the road from St Pancras station in London, and there will be 45 by 2011.
