A friend who had returned from the United States once told me that when he signed up there to learn driving, the trainer told him, “Driving a car is a privilege, not a right.” It suddenly allowed me to understand why most — if not all — drivers in that country tend to stop before the zebra-crossing, allowing pedestrians to pass, or why they stopped at a red light in the dead of night as surely as they would in peak-hour traffic.

I believe that learning to drive is like learning a language — you can either pick it up and wing it as you go along, or you can learn it the right way. In India, most drivers ‘pick it up’. Once they survive a few weeks behind the wheel without too many scratches and dents, they assume a certain mastery over the art and lose sight of the rules. In truth, it is mere happenstance that not more lives are lost than the National Crime Records Bureau reported in 2013 : every day, road accidents caused 377 deaths and 1,287 injuries in India.

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Every work-day of the week, when I go back home, I have to turn left into a lane off the main road to reach my house. Everyday, I switch on the left indicator early enough to alert drivers behind me of my intentions to turn into the lane. Everyday, there is a two-wheeler that tags along on the left, realises too late that he or she won't be able to make it, slams the breaks, waits for me to get off the road and then carries on sullenly. A friend jokes that lack of nutrition in childhood causes cognitive problems in most Indians, which prevents them from recognising traffic signs or observing what others are doing on the road. I have nothing to refute this bizarre suggestion.

The indicator amnesty

After nearly 10 years of driving in India, I finally lost it last week and barked at a young gent driving a car, asking why he swerved right into my lane from the opposite direction while I was navigating a free-left at a signal. What was his nonsensical answer? “I had the indicator on.” Huh? Having the indicator on does not give one the right to mow down folks on the wrong side of the road. Besides indicators are meant to indicate to drivers behind you that you are attempting a turn, not serve as an all-forgiving licence to cut into a wrong lane just because it appears to be free of traffic.

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Another day, I was at a traffic signal when a young adult on a snazzy-looking bike overtook me from my left, cutting right across into my path, while I was to go on straight. I barked again, and he responded indignantly: “Didn’t you see my indicator?” I was dumbstruck. Spotting someone’s indicator ahead of oneself is one thing. To spot it on a vehicle coming from behind and to one’s left is quite another.

Auto-matic stop

A daily occurrence is the blocking of road space by school vans or share-autos (that are dime a dozen in Chennai). They plonk themselves in the middle of the road when their patrons have to get in or out. All they can give back in answer to “Why can’t you move to a corner of the road?” is sheer surprise that someone is impacted by their action or that someone is so impatient that he cannot spare a minute to wait. In a 10-km journey, you only need 10 such blockages to lengthen your trip by 10 minutes!

Clearly, none of these drivers is aware of his folly. How do you change a populace that does not know it is erring? Or a populace that feels entitled to keep 20 others waiting on the road for a minute that serves solely one individual’s purpose?

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On the flipside, most of these errant drivers probably think I am making much ado about nothing. At least my own driver, who put up with me for two years, did tell me so. Inspired by a talk by Sundaram Fasteners’ Chairman Suresh Krishna, who claimed he stops at red lights whether it was 3 a.m. or 3 p.m., I instructed my driver not to break any road rules any more, at all. Soon after, he quit, saying he felt like an idiot standing at a red signal as the rest of the world passed him by!

The law is a one-way street

The same driver once insisted on going up the wrong side of a one-way street, arguing that it was surely a two-way street. We were promptly stopped by a police sergeant. My driver started pleading and arguing with the law-keepers. I intervened and apologised to the policeman saying I ought to have put my foot down and stopped the driver and that the policeman should charge us accordingly. My driver sulked for the rest of the day with an accusation, “First time I have a charge against my name. But for you I would have convinced the policeman not to charge me!”

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In other words, we all take pride in taking the short-cut and breaking the rules as long as the law does not catch up with us. It shows a school-boy approach to the rules: “Break them so long as your teacher does not catch you!”

In a country of more than a billion people like India, I wonder why all of this aggression and competitive spirit in getting ahead of the rest does not contribute to a rich Olympic-medal tally.

Let me end with a couple of anecdotes that sum up the spirit of lawlessness on our roads:

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A cab driver in Chennai, who drove a truck earlier, spoke proudly of his all-India exposure. He ended his lecture with, “Only in Tamil Nadu do drivers adjust and let us pass, saar. In Mumbai, for example, they don’t let you swerve into their lane. They say that I have to switch my indicator on, wait for the vehicle immediately behind me to pass… Stickler for rules, those fellows!” In other words, he means, ‘I am too lazy to follow the rules; kindly adjust.”

At a thickly congested signal, again in Chennai, I stopped at a red light. While I waited, a policeman ambled up and asked, “Why didn’t you move on with the last of those vehicles that jumped the light, saar? You could have freed up some space here for the vehicles behind you.” Am I supposed to follow the law? Or heed the words of the law-keeper and break it? I guess I am lost.