Thirty years after I left it, I realized that Beewada deserves to have a syndrome named after it. In my mind, it survives as both a noun and an adjective. The place where I spent a part of my childhood and early youth was a small town aspiring to be a big city. Everything about it was aspirational. The single arterial road that connected us to the highway was as wide as any in the big metropolitan cities of India and hid the reality of its narrow, broken, roads that crisscrossed the interior parts of the town. Traffic always moved above permissible speed limits, and people drove with aggression that bespoke their desire to get ahead in life quickly. Life was a rat race, after all, and the road was their race course. Beewada had gained from the prosperity that accompanied the introduction of new technologies in the villages surrounding…