Benedict Jebakumar, a 41-year-old systems engineer in Bangalore, has a strange fixation — picking up nails from the road.
It all started when Jebakumar, who had moved to the Garden City four years ago, noticed several nails strewn all over the road he took to work. This was a 20km stretch of the Outer Ring Road, from Banashankari, where he lives, to his office in Ecospace Business Park in Belladur. Mostly, these were small, sharp nails — the kind used by cobblers. Jebakumar, who cycled to work, would pick them up and put them away, but the next morning the nails would be back. Mystifyingly, these were new nails – as if someone had just bought them to throw them on the road.
Soon, Jebakumar realised what was happening — a bunch of flat-tyre repairers, who had set up shop along the road, had been strewing these nails as a ploy to ensure regular business. "The crooks chose their spots carefully – along the left lane where two-wheelers plied," Jebakumar says. The strategy worked, too, as Jebakumar himself faced six flat tyres in four weeks.
Jebakumar began to look out for these nails as he peddled, then stopped to pick them up. "Sometimes there were as many as 500 in a day," he found. Then, a friend suggested that he should report the menace to the authorities. Jebakumar did so and the police stepped up its vigil, arresting one man in September and another in April. The nails stopped cropping up for a while, but even now, says Jebakumar, he can find a few.
He has even come up with a device to make the process easier and faster. "In the beginning, I would squat down and pick up nails by hand. Then my son suggested that I use a magnet, but even that was cumbersome as I had to stoop down. So I devised a tool, using a broken fishing road – I am passionate about fishing – to which I fixed a strong magnet from an old car stereo."
It's become so second-nature that everywhere he goes, Jebakumar now has an eye out for nails on the road. "We went to Hosur recently, and on the way I found three nails. My wife has started to get upset with my obsession."
But Jebakumar is unapologetic. All the posts he gets on his Facebook page — My Road, My Responsibility, on which he posts daily updates on the number of nails he's found — keep him going. "Besides, it's dangerous. What if a woman driver faces a flat tyre late at night? She will have to tow her vehicle for kilometres – it's not safe."
