HORN PLEASE!

Ever since the time I turned 18 (not a long while ago) people around me have time and again ridiculed me on not knowing how to ride a two-wheeler. Apparently the modern independent woman should know how to rule the roads too. Although to me it is trivial, yet I succumbed to the pressures and took driving lessons for both two and four-wheelers.

But all my worst nightmares came true the day I ventured into the roads! Oh My God!! It was like venturing into the Well-of-Death (one of those famous attractions of an Indian Circus a decade ago) literally with sure-shot recipes put in to make sure the motive is achieved. The space of wide roads are more than halved by street vendors and mindless civilians’ parked cars with no sense of any intelligent alignment of parking. You don’t have any clue where to squeeze into in case there is another vehicle demanding space.

Of course there is no footpath because that has been converted to a flea market, so pedestrians are walking on the roads and cars that apply their right to use them too are yelled at time and again! It is the best place to learn the choicest of expletives if you know what I mean ;)

There are buses and autos which would be going at 60-70 kmph and would suddenly come to a halt without any proper notice to pick up passengers even if it isn’t a proper stand or depot they are standing at. And the unfortunate train of vehicles behind these buses and autos are expected to read their minds and forecast their every halt and apply caution accordingly!!

Road rules are obsolete, nobody cares about them nowadays. The most  irritating of all is that often women are criticised and blamed of most accidents because apparently they are naïve and will never get how to properly drive but it is mostly men that I have observed acting like over-smart know-it-alls causing accidents!!! They should know better than to throw stones when they themselves live in glass houses.

Out of the thousand other anomalies and idiosyncrasies that only the Indian driver can pull, the most common and hilarious of all these is people trying to look like Pros blaring their horns and rendering everyone around deaf, while stuck in the middle of the roads. For instance there’s a mile long jam, you are stuck and nowhere to move, neither the one before you nor the one ahead of him yet you would stick your hand right on the horn (with full force that too) somehow thinking inside your weird mind the jam will vanish!

The logic behind the story of the Indian Road escapes me. Cows and dogs have made it their home, beggars have made it their office, kids have decided that that is their stadium, where the hell will vehicles go then? To top it all, people are so lazy that they do not even bother to turn their heads while backing a car or entering into a new road from a cut. They have decided to put traffic rules in the dumpster and the only thing that their miraculous brains have planned to process is ‘HORN PLEASE!’

My my my who wants to be a modern independent woman now, if this is what it takes? Not me for sure.

LOVE :)

Endless honking and Constant blaring!!

ADITI