ULTA-PULTA
Road (non)sense!
Jaspal Bhatti

I was posing as a fake bus driver in a mock interview for Doordarshan. I was asked,"How did you become a bus driver?" I replied with great pride,"From my childhood my eyesight as well as my reflexes were quite poor. The elders in the family suggested that nothing would be better for me than to be a bus driver." The interviewer asked again,"If your eyesight is weak how do you see the other moving objects like the scooterists and cyclists on the road?" I explained,"It is for them to see the bus. Their eyesight should be perfect!"

A few days back the Chandigarh Police observed the Road Safety Week and 250 bus drivers were examined at an eye camp. Young school children also stood at 14 various traffic intersections and distributed traffic-related literature.

The traffic sense of Indians is diametrically opposite to that of people in the West. In the UK, if someone blows a horn, it is considered offensive. Sometimes people even end up fighting saying,"Why did you blow the horn when I was driving correctly?"

On Indian roads the case is just the opposite. Clear instructions are painted on the rear of trucks — ‘Blow Horn Please’. Here people can hurl abuses at you saying,"How dare you try to overtake me without blowing your horn?"

One can blow horn any time, any place, on any pretext. You can blow the horn loudly because you don’t have a music system in your car. Most car drivers, however, blow horns just to show that they own a car.

If you can drive on Indian roads, you can drive anywhere in the world. Although one is supposed to drive on the left side of the road, but in reality the norm is to drive on any portion of the road that is vacant.

I met a friend of mine in Canada, who is a truck driver there. I asked him,"Didn’t you find right-hand driving system here difficult to master after driving left hand in India?" He said,"No problem yaar! I used to drive in the middle of the road in India and I do the same in Canada!"

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