Perhaps a third of crops rot on roadsides and in warehouses before anyone has a chance to smother them in spices and wolf them with chapatis.Foreign supermarket chains, such as Walmart, Tesco and Carrefour, have raised half a cheer.
That event ignited the latest bloody phase of Balochistan's on-off revolt against Pakistan, which has seen hundreds of mutilated bodies dumped on roadsides, thousands of people go missing and revenge killings by security forces and by competing tribal and religious factions.Zulfikar joined the Balochistan Liberation Army BLAA).
Gurgaon's roadsides are disfigured by deep trenches, where the trunk sewer line waits to be laid.Now that India's economy is slowing and competition for men, materials and money is slackening, India's public infrastructure may have a chance to catch up.
Iraqis have cleared the armoured detritus of war, swept the streets, and even painted the roadsides of Baghdad's main streets.
Through the bitterly cold winter many lived in dug-out shelters along the roadsides.
Cars cannot drive around Srinagar without manoeuvring past army roadblocks, snipers in pillboxes, lines of soldiers on the roadsides and military convoys.
The reason why plastic bags blow about by the roadsides in so many poor countries, says Philippe Chalmin of the Université Paris Dauphine, is not that the local people are litterbugs but that they are frugal enough not to need a waste-collection system of any sort.
Since July 2010 over 300 battered corpses have been flung on roadsides and in remote areas across the province.
As the photograph above shows, wrecked cars are sometimes put on display by roadsides as a warning to drivers (the message on the pole reads "cherish life, drive safely").
One such rule of thumb involves the blooming of the Cassia fistula tree, which is common on roadsides in southern Gujarat.
There, the talk will be of beach houses and yachts on the Red Sea, of hot stocks on the Cairo exchange, and of Egypt's delightfully low-cost labour.A less lucky traveller, however, might instead see these things as most Egyptians do: in the giant backlit billboards that clutter Cairo's roadsides and rooftops, vividly flaunting the unattainable.
