[Image: Via India Times].
In order to comply with a new regulation that drinking establishments must be “at least 500m away from state and national highways,” a bar in India has apparently installed “a 250m-long maze-like walkway to the entrance, theoretically making it more than 500m away from the highway.”
It is a regulatory baffler, we might say.
According to the local excise commissioner, “We do not measure the aerial distance but only the walking distance”—therefore this multiplication of space does, indeed, meet the letter of the law. Two objects standing side by side could, legally speaking, be miles apart.
It’s the architecture of compression and delay: a hundred feet hidden in ten, a short walk transformed into a labyrinth of approach and misdirection.
(Via Atlas Obscura; vaguely related: The Switching Labyrinth, The Permission We Already Have, and The Rule of Regulations).