Recently I have been driving quite a lot in and around delhi. It comes naturally to a lot of us. I ve seen 15 years old kids handling a four wheeler. Driving a car has to be the easiest of all man-machine interactions because everyone i know has somewhere push-buttoned a car and they are all still far from even getting in the vicinity of a Slingsby T-67 Firefly. So to sum it up, its an easy job, more than half of the controls are operated by the subconscious and any tom, dick or hari could do the job.
WRONG
Its the most dangerous task in the whole shebang. It requires the stamina of a Navy Seal. Cognitive abilities of a space shuttle pilot. A to B navigation requires thorough strategic planning and execution. Each and every overtake needs a good amount of honking and a fair amount of luck. Be it riding along on the freeway with the measly 150cc engines of your pathetic indian bike or sitting in the pretentious realm of safety and luxury of your god awful indian car. You have a good chance to potentially die to death everyday you are out on the tarmac. Yet, it seems like a facile activity to most of us.
An aircraft pilot needs to understand the control equipments, radio, navigation, etc. properly and the airplane is in total control of his and of course their lies a horde of experts on the ground to help get the plane safely to the destination. Driving is still primordial as compared to flying.
Here we need anticipations, mutual understanding. No body assisting, no navigators, no backups, no clever equipments. Its solely dependent on the driver with a few hydraulic pedals and shafts providing control. Imagine millions of machines out on the road at one time and a simple law of probability predicts about 400,000 mistakes committed at one point of time, which might lead to a minimum of about 800,000 accidents at one point of time. A car is driven not according to the driver but also to the others present on the road. In a city where lanes are an alien concept, people make their own ways out and 'might' has the right to way. 40% of the drivers out there have no regards whatsoever for the rules and regulations and the rest 60% are not aware of them. A minor confusion could lead to a catastrophe.
I ve spoken to people in the west who have had the misfortune to drive in delhi. Most of them
have gone bonkers and now live in a premise named 'home for loonies', the rest are dead. Delhi and say, London are incommensurable in terms of driving ethics and traffic laws. A popular maxim states that anyone who can drive in delhi can drive anywhere else in the world. This strikes another chord and tosses another big question which i shall deal with in my very next blog...
Coming back to the topic at hand..
The numbers and stats make it even more daunting. The vicious delhi roads claim about 5 people each day. The buses and trucks contributing whole-heartedly in this figure. And thats just delhi. Most of the indian metros are no exception and are notoriously dangerous.
As a summation to all of the above, I' d like to quote a leading journalist who'd just completed an Indo-Pak road trip:
"In Pakistan, bandits have been known to kidnap foreigners. In India it’s the roads themselves that are the country’s murderers"
