A brief moral history of the Indian road
India has a philosophy problem. We just park it on the road where everyone can see it.
If you want to understand what a culture actually believes — not what it says it believes, not what it posts on LinkedIn, not what it claims to believe when a foreigner asks — watch how it drives. The road is the only honest place left. There are no manners on the road. There is only character.
And friends, the character is not good.
The Speed Breaker Confession
Let us begin with the speed breaker, that blunt instrument of civic despair.
A speed breaker is what happens when a government gives up. Not on roads. On people. It is infrastructure’s way of saying: we asked nicely. We put up signs. We painted lines. You ignored all of it. So now we are going to put a small concrete mountain in your path and let physics do what appeals to decency could not.
Every speed breaker is a small surrender. Every road in India with seventeen speed breakers in four hundred metres is a detailed account of exactly how many times we failed each other.
We did not build speed breakers. We earned them.
The Great Indian Queue Theory
Here is a thing that is true and that nobody told you in school:
If everyone in a traffic jam holds their lane, everyone moves. The system is imperfect, slow sometimes, occasionally maddening — but it moves. Everyone reaches. The queue, maintained, is a machine that serves all of its inputs.
The moment one person cuts — one — the system develops a clot.
Not a slowdown. A clot. The lane-cutter doesn’t just inconvenience the person immediately behind him. He introduces turbulence that propagates backwards through fifty, a hundred, two hundred vehicles who had nothing to do with his impatience. Each of them brakes slightly. Each brake compounds. Four minutes of gridlock from one man who saved himself thirty seconds and will never know what he caused because he was already through the intersection when the consequences arrived.
He thinks he won.
He caused a small cardiac event in the city’s circulatory system and drove away whistling.
This is the stent problem. Indian traffic doesn’t need more roads. It needs fewer clots. And the clots are not structural. The clots have names. The clots drive Scorpios.
A Brief Taxonomy of the Entitled
Let us be precise about who we are dealing with.
The Mahindra Scorpio Man is the purest expression of the phenomenon. He did not buy a vehicle. He bought a declaration. For years — years — he drove a hatchback and was overtaken on the left. He was patient. He was nobody. And then, one EMI at a time, he crossed a threshold. Now he sits three feet above the road and the road is his.
He will not let you merge. He has waited too long to let anyone through. He will sit on his horn at a traffic light that turned green 0.4 seconds ago. He is not driving to work. He is arriving.
The Maruti Swift Man is the Scorpio Man in a smaller body, which makes it worse. The Swift is not a dominant vehicle. It has 998cc and approximately the road presence of an anxious goat. But inside it is a man who believes he is driving a Porsche. He cuts lanes. He tailgates. He flashes his lights at an auto-rickshaw as though the auto-rickshaw has offended his bloodline.
The energy-to-vehicle ratio is alarming.
The XUV 700 / BE Electric Man deserves a special mention because he has solved the speed breaker problem entirely. His vehicle simply floats over it. You built a concrete deterrent. He bought 220mm ground clearance. Infrastructure as moral statement; money as the counter-argument. He doesn’t break rules. He levitates above them.
There is something almost philosophical about this if you are not the pedestrian he nearly collected.
The Wrong-Side Special: A Character Study
And now. Now. We arrive at the one that must be nailed to the wall and examined in full light.
You know this person. You have been this person, don’t lie to me.
He is driving somewhere. He misses his turn — or perhaps he didn’t miss it; perhaps he simply decided at the last minute that making the correct U-turn 600 metres ahead is beneath him. So he does the thing. He crosses the divider — the one on his right, the one that exists specifically to prevent this — and then hugs it on his new illegal trajectory as though proximity to the thing he just violated is somehow protection. He proceeds calmly, without apparent shame, into oncoming traffic for anywhere between fifty metres and half a kilometre, while the rest of civilization comes at him head-on.
He does this to save. A. U-turn.
Not time. Not fuel. Not effort. A U-turn. A simple, legal, designed-for-purpose curve in the road that asks him to travel an additional 400 metres and return to his exact desired path. This is the obstacle he has decided is too much.
The U-turn, apparently, is for people with less important destinies.
This morning, on a single stretch of road, I counted. Seventeen. Seventeen riders on the wrong side, in one commute, on one road, in one city. I was not looking for them. I was not trying to be outraged. They simply kept arriving, one after another, like a referendum on the U-turn.
The official explanation is that the temptation becomes too strong when someone sees their destination right across the road — a few saved minutes, wrongly valued over safety. This is also, if you read it slowly, an admission that we are making life-and-death decisions based on the emotional distress of a U-turn.
A young mother of two lost her life near Kempegowda International Airport in Bengaluru when a car on the wrong side of a flyover rammed into the scooter she was riding pillion on. She was flung off the flyover. The driver sped away.
The driver sped away.
He had somewhere to be, you see. The U-turn would have taken too long.
I have, on three separate occasions, watched a two-wheeler rider come wrong-side down a road, make eye contact with me as I drove correctly in my lane, and then gesture — actually gesture — for me to move aside to accommodate his illegal trajectory. Full hand wave. The confidence of a man who has never once been questioned.
On one occasion the rider was eating something. I don’t know what. I was too busy having a small existential crisis.
The Hills Know Something We Don’t
Go to Coorg. Go to Munnar. Go to Spiti or Tawang or anywhere the road narrows to the width of a reasonable apology.
Up there, a different culture operates. Pehle aap. You first. Not as politeness — as physics. The road cannot hold two egos simultaneously. Aggression in the hills is not rewarded. It is punished immediately and expensively, often involving a hillside. So people cooperate. They flash lights to signal passage. They reverse without drama. They wait.
They are not better people. The road made them better drivers.
The plains have wide roads, and wide roads are where character goes to die. Impunity lives where there is room to be wrong without immediate consequence. The SUV takes the space. The clot forms. The city slows.
And somewhere in a bungalow, a man who drove wrong-side this morning is telling his child that India will never progress because of corruption.
What You Can Do
Let someone through today. Specifically.
Not because they deserve it. Not because the law requires it. Because the queue works when you work with it, and you know this, and you’ve known it this whole time, and the thirty seconds you lose by yielding cost you nothing and give the person behind you — and the fifty people behind them — something.
Hold your lane. Take the U-turn. It’s 400 metres. Your destination will still be there.
If the person behind you doesn’t let you in, that’s his problem and his karma and eventually his stent.
You’re better than the road. Prove it by not needing to win it.
Pehle aap.
P.S. The fine for wrong-side driving in Delhi is ₹5,000 for a first offence and ₹10,000 for repeat offenders. The fine for killing someone with your impatience is something the law has a number for but the conscience does not.
Take the U-turn.
comically 
Leave a comment