In the Punjabi months of Poh and Magh (ਪੋਹ, ਮਾਘ), which run roughly from the middle of December to the middle of February, the plains of Punjab are given over for long stretches to fog. It gathers on still, clear nights, when the ground gives up the day’s warmth to an open sky and the damp air lying on the fields cools until it can no longer hold its water. By morning it rests across the land like a held breath, and on some days it does not lift at all. Trains run hours late. Flights wait. On the roads an oncoming vehicle is first a pair of pale smudges and then, quite suddenly, a truck. The Punjabi word for it is ਧੁੰਦ, dhund, and it tends to be said in a tone that anyone who has lived through a Punjab winter will recognise: part complaint, part acknowledgement that there is nothing to be done.
The mechanism I have just described, the one that schoolbooks teach, is radiation fog, and it is the commonest kind on the plains but not the only one. A study of fog across India published in the International Journal of Climatology in 2023, by Daniel Smith and colleagues at the University of East Anglia, classified fog events at sixty-nine sites between 2000 and 2020 by the way they formed. Radiation fog accounted for about two-thirds of them. The rest came about in other ways: moist air drifting over colder ground, rain evaporating into chilled air, a low cloud base sinking to the surface. December and January were the principal fog months. The western disturbances that cross the north of the subcontinent in winter, bringing moisture and then clear skies behind them, were linked to many fogs but by no means all. And at Delhi, Lucknow and Patna, fog had become significantly more frequent over two decades, a change the authors thought more likely to reflect urban growth and the particles it puts into the air than any shift in the weather systems alone. Fog, in other words, is a family of phenomena with a common face, and some of its recent thickening may be partly of our own making.
I want to use it in this essay for something simple that turns out to be hard. Fog does not remove the road. It removes the view of how far the road goes. Most of us measure our confidence by the distance we can see ahead, and fog separates two things we usually treat as one: knowing a route and seeing the road. I am not describing any particular drive of my own here. The road and the winter are a landscape to think with, and I will try to describe them accurately before I ask them to mean anything.
A River of Life #
The road has had its great describer, and he wrote in sunshine. In Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, published in 1901, an old soldier rides out to set the boy and his lama on their way and shows them, a day’s walk beyond Umballa, as Kipling spelled Ambala, “the Great Road which is the backbone of all Hind.” Then the narrator takes over: “And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India’s traffic for fifteen hundred miles—such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world.” Brahmins and leather-workers, bankers and tinkers, barbers and traders, pilgrims and potters: the old soldier reels them off in pairs, “all the world going and coming,” and says the road is to him like a river from which he has been withdrawn like a log after a flood.
Kim’s Punjab is a country of visibility. Earlier in the book, from the window of a train, “the morning mists smoked away across the flat green levels,” and “all the rich Punjab lay out in the splendour of the keen sun.” On the road itself, at the start of a day, “the morning mist swept off in a whorl of silver,” and the boy wakes into a world of bustle and new sights “at every turn of the approving eye.” In these Punjab passages the mist lifts, and usually before the sentence is over. That is not a meteorological error; it is the novel’s temperament. Kim is a book about a boy whose gift is seeing, and its plot runs on observation.
The clearest instance is a game. In the shop of Lurgan Sahib in Simla, Kim is set to play what the book calls the Play of the Jewels against a younger boy. A handful of stones is dealt into a copper tray; the player may look as long as he likes; then the tray is covered with a sheet of newspaper and he must recite what lies beneath. Kim, who prides himself on his eyes, loses badly. The other boy names every sapphire and flawed emerald and gives their weights, and Kim’s excuse is revealing: “He knew the names of the stones.” Names help the eye to keep what it has seen. The game trains memory of a scene once viewed, which is exactly the faculty a spy needs, and Kipling’s road is the open-air version of the tray, laid out in sunlight for anyone who can name what is passing.
Fog plays the game in reverse. On a winter morning in Poh the paper is over the tray before you have looked, and what you remember of the tray from yesterday tells you nothing about what has been placed on it since. A river of life is still flowing along the road; you simply cannot see its far bank, or its next bend, or the cart that has stopped in the lane ahead. The road Kipling saw is real, and it is the same road. It is not the road a driver meets at seven o’clock on a January morning between Amritsar and Jalandhar.
The Names of a Road #
The road’s own history is a lesson in layers that look like one thing. In 2015 India submitted the historic sites along it to UNESCO’s tentative list under a title that is itself a short history: “Sites along the Uttarapath, Badshahi Sadak, Sadak-e-Azam, Banho, Grand Trunk Road.” The nomination describes the ancient Uttarapath, the northern route of the Mauryan period; the Sadak-e-Azam, the great road, of Sher Shah Suri’s short-lived dynasty in the mid-sixteenth century; the Badshahi Sadak, the king’s road, of the Mughals; and the Grand Trunk Road of British rule. Sher Shah is credited with reconstructing the highway and laying out its track again, planting trees, and building the structures that make long travel possible: sarais where travellers could stop for the night, wells and water bodies, places of worship, and the kos minars, milestones at intervals of a kos. Many of the surviving minars belong to the Mughal period that followed.
Even the length of the road depends on what one counts. The UNESCO nomination says it runs for more than three thousand kilometres from one end of the subcontinent to the other; the figure most often repeated today, about 3,600 kilometres, measures from the far south-east of Bangladesh to Kabul. Kipling gave fifteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Calcutta to Peshawar, the road as British India knew it. None of these is wrong. Each is an answer to a different question about where a road begins and ends, and the alignments themselves have moved over the centuries, so that the line on the modern map is the old route only in approximation. In Indian Punjab the road today is carried by national highways: NH 44 from Delhi through Ambala and Ludhiana to Jalandhar, and NH 3 from Jalandhar through Amritsar to Attari and the border.
The border is the newest layer and the sharpest. Before 1947 the road ran on from Amritsar to Lahore without interruption, some fifty kilometres of the same plain. In the summer and autumn of that year it became one of the routes of Partition; one account of the population transfers notes that refugees from the Lahore tehsil took the Grand Trunk Road between Lahore and Amritsar. Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, published in 1956, begins in the summer of 1947, with the monsoon late, in a village half a mile from the Sutlej whose days are timed by the trains crossing the bridge nearby. Its subject is the railway rather than the road, and summer rather than winter, but it belongs to the same geography: a literature of routes along which people fled and on which some never arrived. The road’s first winter as a divided road was the winter of 1947. Since then, from Amritsar, it has pointed one way toward Delhi and the rest of India, and the other way toward a border crossing at Attari and Wagah. Which meaning dominates depends on where a person is standing and which way he happens to be facing.
What the Dates Allow #
One coincidence on this road has always pleased me, and it is worth looking at carefully precisely because it pleases. Guru Angad Dev received the guruship from Guru Nanak in 1539 and made Khadur, the town my family comes from, an early centre of the Sikh community. In 1540, near Kannauj, Sher Shah defeated the Mughal emperor Humayun, who fled west and lost his throne for fifteen years. The road’s rebuilder and the town’s Guru belong to the same handful of years and to the same stretch of the Majha, and a tradition makes the coincidence into a meeting. According to Sikh tradition, Humayun came to Khadur in his flight and sought Guru Angad’s blessing. Later tellings elaborate the scene, as later tellings do.
I hold the story as tradition and not as documented history, and I want to be exact about why. The dates permit the meeting. They do not establish it. A defeated emperor on the run through the Punjab in 1540 could have passed near Khadur; that he did, and that he stopped, rests on the tradition and not on the chronology. The pleasure of the coincidence is a pleasure of pattern, and pattern is exactly the thing that fog teaches us to distrust. A remembered history arranged into a satisfying shape is like a remembered bend in a familiar road. It tells you what to expect. It cannot tell you what is there.
That is not an argument for discarding the tradition. Traditions carry what a community chose to remember, and the choice is itself a historical fact worth having. The story of an emperor humbled at a Guru’s door says something true about how Khadur has wished to be seen. The discipline is only to keep its label on, so that the story is passed on as what it is and does not quietly harden, with each telling, into a fact that no record supports.
The Familiar Bend #
Anyone who has driven in dense fog learns how quickly familiarity turns from an asset into a hazard. On a stretch of road you know well, you know the bend is coming. You do not see it. Knowledge of the road and sight of the road turn out to be separate faculties, and in fog the first can tempt a driver into ignoring the absence of the second. The local driver is not necessarily the safest one on a foggy morning. He may be the one most inclined to drive as though he could see.
Knowing where the bend lies is useful information. It does not tell a driver whether something has stopped beyond it. The first fact comes from familiarity; the second requires a view of the present. Confusing these two kinds of knowledge is one of the ways confidence becomes disconnected from what a situation currently permits. Experience can suggest what to look for, which questions matter, and which possibilities deserve early attention. It cannot certify that the present case contains nothing new: a broken-down tractor, a herd being driven across, a fresh diversion where the highway is being widened. Familiarity is strongest when it directs observation. It is weakest when it replaces observation altogether.
There is a subtler version of the same mistake, and road-safety guidance names it with unusual precision. The United Kingdom’s Highway Code, in its rules on fog, warns that the rear lights of the vehicle in front can give a false sense of security. A driver who cannot see the road can see two red lights, and it is natural to follow them, keeping close so as not to lose them, as if the driver ahead could see what you cannot. The United States National Weather Service, advising drivers caught in near-zero visibility to pull well off the road and stop, adds an instruction that only makes sense in light of this habit: turn off every light except the hazard flashers, and take your foot off the brake so that the tail lights go dark. The reason is that someone behind may take your lights for a moving road and follow you off it.
The Highway Code contains a quieter instruction that I like even more. At a junction where visibility is limited, it tells drivers to stop in the correct position and listen for traffic, and then, when they are sure it is safe, to emerge positively rather than hesitating in the path of whatever is approaching. Stop, listen, then act without dithering: it is a small model of judgement under poor visibility, and it does not pretend that the eyes are the only source of evidence. When sight fails, the other senses do not become irrelevant. They become the main ones.
The tail-light instruction, though, is the one I find most instructive of all. In fog, the most dangerous knowledge is someone else’s apparent knowledge. The lights ahead look like information about the road, but they are only information about another driver, who may be just as blind, and who may have stopped. Confidence borrowed from the lights in front is not sight. It is a guess that has been made to look like a view.
The Speed of Sight #
There is an old rule of the road that fits fog precisely: drive at a speed at which you can stop within the distance you can see. The Highway Code puts it for fog in so many words, telling drivers to “be able to pull up well within the distance you can see clearly.” In clear weather the rule is nearly invisible, because sight distance is long and nobody thinks about it. In fog it becomes the whole of driving. The speed is no longer set by the road, the vehicle, the posted limit or the urgency of arriving. It is set by sight, and it changes as sight changes, from one bank of fog to the next.
The rule has a companion that is easy to forget. Stopping dead in the lane is not safe either. A vehicle halted on a fog-bound highway is invisible to the one coming up behind it. Once a driver is on the road, the question that matters most of the time is pace: how fast can I go and still be able to respond to whatever appears at the edge of what I can see? The answer is rarely zero and rarely the speed of a clear day. It is a number that has to be recalculated continuously from the evidence, which is exactly why it is uncomfortable.
English literature’s most famous fog is not a weather report but an indictment, and it is worth reading closely because it shows what happens when an institution refuses the rule. Bleak House, which Dickens published in monthly parts in 1852 and 1853, opens in “implacable November weather” with soot falling “as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun,” and then: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.” The fog thickens as the paragraphs approach the law. It is densest near Temple Bar, and “at the very heart of the fog” sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery, “with a foggy glory round his head,” gazing at “the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog.”
Two chapters later Dickens gives the same weather to a newcomer. Esther Summerson, arriving in London from the country, sees streets “so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen,” and asks the young clerk sent to meet her whether there is a great fire anywhere. “Oh, dear no, miss,” he says. “This is a London particular.” Then, since she has never heard of such a thing: “A fog, miss.” The exchange is comic, and it is also exact about two kinds of knowledge. The stranger misreads the evidence, but she reads it as alarming, which it is. The local reads it correctly and has stopped being alarmed by it. His familiarity has given the hazard a pet name. I think of that clerk whenever I am tempted to treat a long acquaintance with some difficulty as though it made the difficulty harmless. Knowing what a thing is called is not the same as being safe in it.
Two things in the Chancery passage seem to me to bear on the Punjab road. The first is that Dickens’s fog is partly manufactured. It is London fog, thick with coal smoke; the soot is in the first paragraph. The study of Indian fog I began with suggests, more cautiously, that the growing frequency of fog in some northern cities may owe something to what cities put into the air. Fog is weather, but it is not only weather. The second, and more important, is the Chancellor’s posture. He cannot see; the fog is in his very court; and he proceeds, with ceremony and at length, as if he could. The danger Dickens describes is not fog itself. It is an authority that will not slow down to the speed of its own sight, and that goes on deciding, in its foggy glory, cases it can no longer see.
The Feeling of Speed #
There is a further twist, and it complicates the tidy rule. The rule assumes that a driver knows how fast he is going. In fog, that knowledge is itself a perception, and perceptions can be bent.
For some years the accepted explanation for why drivers go too fast in fog was that reduced contrast makes motion look slower. Laboratory work on moving patterns had shown that low-contrast objects appear to move more slowly than they do, and driving studies, including one by Snowden and colleagues published in 1998, suggested that the same illusion applied to the sense of one’s own motion: in fog, it was argued, drivers feel slower than they are and speed up to compensate. In 2012 Paolo Pretto and colleagues, working with driving simulators and experienced drivers, published in eLife a result that refined the story. When visibility was reduced equally at every distance, as through a misted windscreen, speed was indeed underestimated, and drivers in the simulator went faster, averaging about 101 kilometres an hour against 85 in clear conditions. But when visibility fell away with distance, as it does in real fog, where near things remain fairly clear and far things vanish, speed was overestimated, and drivers slowed down, to about 71 kilometres an hour. The sense of speed, they argued, depends on how contrast is distributed across the scene, not simply on how much of it there is.
I am wary of making a simulator study carry more than it can, and I do not offer its numbers as a description of any real road. But its central finding seems to me worth carrying away. How fast we feel we are going is constructed from what we can see, and it can be distorted in either direction depending on the shape of the uncertainty. A uniform blur, a problem in the windscreen rather than in the world, tends to make us feel slower than we are and to tempt us onward. Fog that hides the distance while leaving the near ground visible tends to make us feel faster than we are and to hold us back. The two errors run in opposite directions, and neither announces itself. This is one reason a speedometer matters: it is an instrument that does not share the driver’s illusion. In decisions of every kind, I think, the equivalent instrument is something written down in advance, a stated plan, an explicit criterion for changing it, a time set for looking again, because the felt sense of how boldly or cautiously one is proceeding is exactly the thing that poor visibility distorts.
The Case for Waiting #
Here the image I have been using needs correcting. Talk of moving at the speed of sight can imply that movement is always wiser than stopping, and that the virtuous driver is the one who keeps going, carefully, through anything. That is not what the authorities on fog advise, and it is not true of judgement in general. Sometimes the right response is to find a safe place to wait, to obtain better information, or to take a different road. The National Weather Service’s advice for near-zero visibility is to get off the road, not to creep along it. Continuing is not automatically courageous, and waiting is not automatically indecisive. The judgement depends on circumstances, including whether stopping itself creates danger.
The road’s own builders seem to have understood this. What the UNESCO nomination credits to Sher Shah is not only a track but the structures of what it calls intermediate rest: sarais at intervals where travellers could stop for the night, with water and shelter. A great road, on that view, is a system for stopping as much as for moving. It assumes that travellers will be overtaken by dark, by weather, by exhaustion, and it builds in advance the places where waiting can be done safely. The kos minars told a traveller how far he had come; the sarais told him that he did not have to go on tonight. A road that offered only the first and not the second would be a road designed for people who never needed to wait, which is to say for nobody.
The qualification matters because uncertainty is easy to romanticise after the fact. A safe arrival can make a poorly judged decision to set out look wise. A disappointing outcome can make a reasonable decision look foolish. Neither result fully describes the evidence available when the choice was made, and a habit of judging decisions by their outcomes teaches exactly the wrong lessons about fog. The driver who pushed on and arrived safely learns that pushing on works. The one who waited and missed an appointment learns that waiting is costly. Both have learned from luck. The useful discipline is less dramatic: notice what is known, notice what is missing, and let both facts shape the next action, whether that action is a slower speed, a stop in a safe place, or a decision not to set out at all.
The Punjabi year has always made room for weeks of not seeing, and its poetry has a form for them. The barahmaha, the poem of the twelve months, is an old genre of North Indian folk poetry in which the feelings of a person separated from the beloved are read in the changing face of nature, month by month; its prevailing mood is viraha, the pain of separation. The Guru Granth Sahib contains two. In Guru Nanak’s, in Raga Tukhari, the month of Poh comes with frost that drains the sap from woods and grass, and yet the bride, in love with the Beloved, tastes a sweetness the cold cannot reach; in Magh she realises that the true place of pilgrimage is within, and that bathing at sacred rivers is worth less than remembrance. Guru Arjan’s barahmaha, in Raga Majh, is recited in Sikh congregations and homes on the first day of each solar month, so that every month is announced, in effect, by a poem of separation and longing. I describe these passages rather than quote them, and I do not want to bend them into a parable about weather. What they show, at the very least, is a calendar in which the cold, dim weeks of the year are not treated as an interruption of life but as a season with its own meaning.
The folk calendar does the same in a more festive key. Lohri is kept with bonfires on the eve of Maghi, the first day of Magh, in mid-January, near the bottom of the year. The fog does not lift on cue for the bonfires. But the festival is a reminder that the year expected these weeks, planned for them, and gathered people around a fire in the middle of them, without treating the season as a failure of the year.
Fog in the Consulting Room #
Medicine is conducted at fog speed more often than its patients might suppose, and I want to make the comparison carefully, because a comforting metaphor is a poor guide when someone may be seriously ill.
Consider a hypothetical patient, invented for illustration: a person in their forties who has felt unusually tired for some weeks, whose history raises no alarming feature and whose examination and first tests are reassuring. The familiar road says that most such tiredness comes from ordinary causes, poor sleep, strain, the ordinary wear of a working life, and the familiar road is usually right. The fog says that the physician cannot yet see far enough to be sure. The proportionate response is neither to stop in the lane, ordering every test in the hope that one of them will lift the fog at once, nor to drive at clear-weather speed, telling the patient it is nothing and closing the question. It is to proceed at the pace the information allows, with a plan for what to watch, a time to look again, and a clear agreement about what would change the plan.
General practitioners have a name for the last part of that. Roger Neighbour, in The Inner Consultation, introduced the term safety-netting to general practice, and he framed it, as a later review in the British Journal of General Practice summarises, as three questions: what the doctor expects to happen if the working judgement is right; “How will I know if I’m wrong?”; and what the doctor would then do. Those questions are the consulting room’s version of stopping within the distance you can see. They do not pretend to see further than the evidence reaches. They make sure that, when the next stretch of road comes into view, someone will be looking at it.
There is one respect in which the clinical fog differs from the road’s, and it matters. On a road, the driver is the one who will see the next stretch when it appears. In much of medicine, the person who will see it first is the patient: the one who notices that the tiredness has deepened, that a new symptom has arrived, that the expected improvement has not come. Safety-netting, done honestly, therefore hands part of the watching to the person who lives in the body. That only works if the plan is explained in words the patient can use, with a clear sense of what would count as a change and whom to tell. A safety net that exists only in the physician’s note is a milestone painted for a driver who has already left the road. The work of making uncertainty shareable, of saying plainly what is known, what is not yet known, and what would make us look again, is part of the treatment, not a courtesy added to it.
The fog image also explains a familiar clinical hazard. A diagnosis written in a record is a pair of tail lights. A later reader, pressed for time and unable to see much, may follow it simply because it is there and looks like knowledge of the road, when it is only knowledge of what an earlier clinician thought on an earlier day. Following it is sometimes right. Following it without asking whether the driver ahead could see is how a provisional label hardens into an unexamined fact.
The comparison has a firm limit, and I want to state it plainly. Some symptoms signal danger and call for immediate assessment, not reflective waiting; for them the language of fog does not apply, and anyone experiencing them should seek care at once rather than read essays. Uncertainty in medicine is not a mood to be savoured. Where it can be reduced quickly, the duty is to reduce it quickly. The fog image belongs only to the large territory of ordinary, nonurgent uncertainty, where the honest course is to move at the speed of what can be seen and to keep looking.
The Next Milestone #
On Indian highways the distance stones are painted white with a coloured cap, and they carry the name of the next town and the kilometres to it. In function, if not in lineage, they are the successors of the kos minars that the road’s builders set along it centuries ago. In clear weather nobody notices them. In fog you cannot see one coming. It appears when you are already beside it, tells you how far you have come and how far there is still to go, and is gone again in the mirror.
I have come to think of that as a fair description of the kind of knowledge a person has in fog, on a road or anywhere else. The past can be thoroughly known: the history of the road, its names and builders, the dates that fold in on one another, the shape of the bends, the winter months and the poems written for them. All of that is real knowledge, and it helps. It tells you what kinds of thing to watch for. It does not reach forward. A life’s past can be well lit while its next mile lies entirely in fog, and treating familiarity with where one has been as though it were a view of what is coming is the local driver’s mistake, and the Chancellor’s.
What the fog asks for is proportion. I can admit that I see little without concluding that there is little to see. I can tell the next workable stretch apart from a complete account of what lies ahead. I can keep moving when moving is safe, and wait when it is not, and refuse to let either choice be judged by luck. And I can watch for the stones. Some winters, a stone at the roadside, appearing out of the white with a town’s name and a number, is all the road will tell you. It is not much. It is enough to go on, at the speed of sight.
Evidence and Editorial Note #
Documented findings. The essay relies on the author’s public biography: family roots in Khadur Sahib and an upbringing in Amritsar. Fog types in India, the predominance of radiation fog (about 68 per cent of events at 69 sites, 2000–2020), December and January as the main fog months, the partial link with western disturbances, and rising fog frequency at Delhi, Lucknow and Patna, which the authors suggest is more likely related to urban expansion and aerosols: D. K. E. Smith, S. R. Dorling, I. A. Renfrew, A. N. Ross and C. Poku, “Fog trends in India: relationships to fog type and western disturbances,” International Journal of Climatology 43(2), 2023, 818–836 (repository record and abstract). Kipling’s descriptions of the Grand Trunk Road (Chapter III, the old soldier’s village lying a day beyond Umballa), the morning mists, and the Play of the Jewels in Lurgan Sahib’s shop: Kim (1901), Project Gutenberg text. The road’s historical names, Sher Shah Suri’s reconstruction, sarais, kos minars and tree planting, the length of more than 3,000 kilometres, and the 2015 submission by the Permanent Delegation of India: UNESCO World Heritage Centre tentative list entry 6056. The commonly cited length of about 3,655 kilometres from Teknaf to Kabul, the Mughal date of many surviving kos minars, and the present national-highway numbers in Punjab (NH 44 to Jalandhar; NH 3 through Amritsar to Attari): Wikipedia, “Grand Trunk Road”. Refugees from Lahore tehsil taking the Grand Trunk Road between Lahore and Amritsar in 1947: punjabpartition.com, “Population transfer routes,” citing The Tribune, 2012. Train to Pakistan‘s opening setting: publisher’s description (Grove Atlantic) and a chapter summary; the novel is described, not quoted. Guru Angad’s succession in 1539, his move to Khadur, and the tradition that Humayun came to Khadur and sought his blessing: The Sikh Encyclopedia, entry on Guru Angad Dev. Sher Shah’s defeat of Humayun in 1540 is standard history. Highway Code rules 234–236 on fog, including the warning about rear lights and the instruction to be able to pull up well within the distance one can see clearly: text as reproduced at theorytest.org.uk. The rule 235 instruction to stop at junctions with limited visibility, listen for traffic, and emerge positively once sure it is safe: same source. Speed perception in fog, including the finding that speed is underestimated when contrast is reduced uniformly and overestimated when visibility falls with distance as in real fog, with simulator mean speeds of about 85.1, 101.3 and 70.9 km/h, and the earlier view (Snowden et al., 1998, among others) that low contrast makes self-motion seem slower: P. Pretto, J.-P. Bresciani, G. Rainer and H. H. Bülthoff, “Foggy perception slows us down,” eLife 1:e00031, 2012, through which Snowden et al. is cited. The National Weather Service’s advice for near-zero visibility, including pulling off the road and turning off all lights except hazard flashers: weather.gov, “Driving in Fog”. Bleak House opening chapter and Esther Summerson’s arrival in “a London particular”: Project Gutenberg text. The sarais as structures of intermediate rest: UNESCO entry above. The barahmaha genre, Guru Nanak’s Barah Maha in Raga Tukhari (Poh and Magh) and Guru Arjan’s in Raga Majh, recited on the first day of each solar month: Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Punjabi University), entry “Barah Maha”; the passages are described, not quoted. Maghi as the first of Magh with Lohri on its eve: The Sikh Encyclopedia, entry “Maghi”. Roger Neighbour’s three safety-netting questions: S. Almond, D. Mant and M. Thompson, “Diagnostic safety-netting,” British Journal of General Practice 59(568), 2009, 872–874. The colour-capped white milestones of Indian highways are general knowledge. Vendor representations. None.
Recollection and tradition. That the author’s family roots are in Khadur Sahib and that he grew up in Amritsar are part of his published biography. No particular trip, vehicle, date, companion, fog event or stretch of road travelled by the author is described; the road and the fog are used as a reflective landscape. Humayun’s visit to Khadur is presented as Sikh tradition, not as documented fact. The tired patient in the clinical section is explicitly hypothetical.
Analysis and forecast. The use of fog as an image for the difference between familiarity and current evidence, the readings of Kipling, Dickens and the barahmaha, the remarks on tail lights, listening, the felt sense of speed and its instruments, sarais as places for waiting, outcome bias, the patient’s share in watching for change, and the bounded comparison with clinical uncertainty are the author’s interpretation as of November 6, 2026. Nothing in the essay is driving instruction; road-safety guidance is quoted from the named authorities. Independence. This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer. It is personal reflection, not medical advice; readers seeking care should contact their own physician’s office.
About the Author #
Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, MD, traces his family roots to Khadur Sahib in Punjab’s Majha region and grew up in Amritsar. He attended Spring Dale School and completed pre-medical studies at Khalsa College in 1994–1996. He earned his MBBS from Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Amritsar in 2002.
He completed PGY-1 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock in 2007–2008, and PGY-2 and PGY-3 with UCSF Fresno at Community Regional Medical Center from 2008 through 2010. He has practiced medicine in California since 2010.
His career has crossed four distinct information eras: predominantly paper-based medicine, early and fragmented electronic records, the integrated-EHR era, and the emerging age of generative and agentic artificial intelligence.