Issue February 15 - 28

It can be the most dangerous place to be, and we make it so

I looked casually into the rear view mirror while driving to work, and was shocked by what I saw. Across the road, a little distance away, there seemed to be a thick pole, parallel to the ground. How had I got past it? It blocked the entire road! Slowing down, I took a second look. At the end of the pole was a truck cabin. I realised then that it was a truck in the process of taking a steep U turn, and that the ‘pole’ was the empty trailer minus a container.

I wondered, as I drove along, what would happen if such a ‘pole’ barred the road late in the night. I drive back late from town quite often, and the roads are quite empty, and even if I am doing just 60 or 70 kmph, there is every chance that I will not see a trailer lying across the road like a linear python till I am too close to it to avoid trouble. Worse still, imagine a real fast driver, or a motorcyclist coming face to face with this idly turning trailer. I’d rather not...
It is amazing how casually we take our life on the roads. Pedestrian or motorist, cyclist or scooter rider, we take safety on the roads for granted, doing nothing to ensure it for ourselves or for others.

Indian roads are, I think, the world’s most interesting when it comes to the number and variety of vehicles using them. Cars of varying sizes and ages, hand carts, two wheelers, three wheelers, tempos, trucks, trailers, wagons, the occasional Victoria, the kerosene bundi , the bullock cart; we have them all jostling for the same road space, and chances are the road itself is seeking to find its own identity, marked as it is by potholes, steep shoulders and squatters.

The road users have to literally fend for themselves as they pick their way to and fro. Despite the fact that the traffic police in Mumbai at least is eternally on the alert, there is so much that puts each of us at risk — trucks without brake lights or no lights, with deadly iron rods sticking a mile out of the rear sans warning; dividers that start and stop without warning; clusters of speed breakers of varying heights...

They do add a clear and present danger quotient to our life on the roads. One moment of a lapse in alertness, a minor distraction is all that is needed, for major trouble to result.

Little wonder there is so much road rage. I have seen drivers who, when not given adequate right of way, actually block the car in front, and even get off and thrash the driver for his ‘bad behaviour’.

We are all to blame. I, who curse under my breath the pedestrian who runs across the road on the highway, or who shows me a restraining hand as he saunters across the street when I have right of way, undergo a personality change when I turn ‘pedestrian’.

Then all drivers turn into villains who have to be persecuted, while I enjoy the road as my birthright. I think it comes from a lack of empathy for our fellow travellers on the road, a feeling of ‘me first’, of I-alone-matter. The scene is worse in other cities and small towns, where the new urbanisation manifests itself as chaos on the road and aggressive flouting of rules.

Surely, we owe it to ourselves to behave with courtesy. Fast cars and swank accessories should be matched by urbane manners, as befits an international citizen.

I tell myself this, as I wait to let an old man cross the road. I tell myself too, that I know that thanks to the tough lessons we learn on the roads here, we can drive safely anywhere in the world.

But there must be more than just this fact, where driving is concerned, that we need to be proud of.

The Editor