Srikant Batt has been living and working in a town in UK for three years now. He says, in these three years he has heard precisely four honks, and he goes to work by public transport every day. How many horns have you heard today on your way to work? More than four I suppose. Well, we Indians have several mannerisms on road that are not fit for the road and it remains a mystery how we manage to survive everyday traffic with them. Let us go through some of these mannerisms.
Honking
Well it has a purpose, to warn others that we are approaching. But that is only a part of the purpose for us. We are obsessed with horns; we honk way more than it is necessary. We do not care about the time, place or purpose. We honk at night, near hospital, when the signal is red, and even without traffic. It is an essential part of our driving, we have to do it. We do not care about decibels, we do not care about the ampere, we do not care if we are harming others and ourselves with it, we just have to do it. We flaunt our horns.
Overtaking
Ours is a country with right hand driving and we keep to left on our roads. It is a well known rule that when we over take we are supposed to do this by the right hand side. So, we can say right hand side is the right side to overtake and left hand side is suicide. Again, we do not care. We over take by the right hand side, the left hand side or whatever side we can possibly find. By doing this, we successfully manage to keep our traffic an absolute mess and we are proud of it, are we not?
Zebra Crossings
Why the heck have they painted some parts of the road in black and white? Why the heck do they call it a zebra crossing? It was a stupid thing to put on a road, was it not? Anyway, we have seen it for what it is and we stop our vehicles on top of those weird lines every time we see a red. It does not make much difference to us if we stop before, but we just love parking on top of them. It is fun in a way, if I am on a motor bike I can park on a white stripe today and a black one tomorrow. I love it!!!
Pedestrians
My bike is like a magnet, a magnet for pedestrians! All of you, who ride bikes understand what I am saying, right? I have no clue from where they come from but every time I go for a ride someone or the other will jump right in front of me, point blank and what follows will be a circus where I am trying not to hit them and they are trying to make my attempts futile. Mostly I win. Those people are supposed to walk on the roadside and not on the road. Well, in some small towns and villages there will not be enough space on the roadside, but not in cities. And they all have this strange look on their faces when a vehicle comes, like they are asking “what the heck is a vehicle doing on a road?” I understand your feelings buddy, this is a mad world.
Traffic Rules
We hate rules as a whole, let us face it, we are no big fans of them. Especially traffic rules, we disdain them. We know that the saying “if you follow traffic rules, you will be safe” is an urban legend. We know traffic rules are plainly useless and there is no point in following them. Of course they make a few traffic cops really rich, apart from that what good are they? We do not care about traffic lights and nothing happens, we overtake from left and nothing happens, we honk throughout the day and nothing, we do not wear helmet most of the times and nothing happens. The rules, which say we should or should not do these, are just jokes, right?
Source – By Hari Anil, SiliconIndia
