[sajo]

For a few months now , I am pursuing the endeavour to appear less like a blob, and chose the early morning hours to do so. I return back home roughly between ~7-7.30 AM , sometimes later, depending on how lazy I am feeling that day. This also happens to be the time when a large number of schools start, and consequently, a large number of parents rushing to drop their wards off to the school. It is incredible that how majority of them , their children in tow, indulge in bad driving practices like :
- Not stopping at red lights (extremely common)
- Driving/Riding on the wrong side (even more common)
- Not wearing seatbelts, helmets , and so on, the list is quite endless actually.
What pains me to see that Indian parents are subjecting almost every child of impressionable age to an education they dont need, when it actually should be the other way round. Parents normally put up their best behaviour in front of kids, so why should driving be any different ? Why the utter disregard for the system and its laws when it comes to road manners ? Convenience ? Do they indulge in shop-lifting in front of their kids just because its convenient to take things for free instead of paying for them ? This is across all classes and genders.
Going by these happenings around, I foresee an even more chaotic future, with the next generation having accepted that anarchy is a way of life.

I recall two incidences that happened in the recent past :
- The stretch leading from MIT School to Ideal colony in Pune is a one way. Early morning , a lady driving a duster (no seat belt) with a small kid sitting up front was merrily driving down the wrong side. I slowed down my bike in their path and indicated that she was driving on the wrong side. Very coolly , she ignored me, swerved to the side now driving in the middle of the road amidst oncoming traffic, and went on as if nothing had happened.
- Near My Wings Honda, I was on foot and a grandfatherly man was riding a scooter on the wrong side with a kid on the footboard. I waved at them and said "Kaka , tumhi ultya side ni chalale ahaat" (Uncle, you are on the wrong side of the road). Not expecting to be stopped and questioned, the man fumbled for a bit , and finally managed to say "Pan amhi ikdech raahto!" (But we live right around here!).

If this is the kind of ignorance that exists, do even have a future ?

Image I clicked some years back, a woman merrily riding on the wrong side of National Highway 4.



Note to Mods : Didnt find a similar thread, merge if present .

[centaur]

Not at all surprised to see that the incidents are from Pune. The mentality and road sense in Pune is going to the dogs. I personally know of a guy working in one of the big MNC's in Hinjewadi and he boasts of going through the wrong side for almost 2-3 kms when there is a jam on the right side. This guy car pools and takes 4 others with him. To think of it, this guy is well educated (apparently but I prefer to call him literate than educated), is in a senior position in his firm and earns pretty well too but this is what he does once on the road. Never does it flash his mind that not only is he causing inconvenience to others who are on the right side of the road, but he is putting those people at risk and also endangering the pool seekers in his car.

Adding to that, he drops his son to school (around 2 year old) every morning and makes the kid sit in his lap all the way from home to school because the car gets filled with pool seekers. I sometimes feel like giving him a tight slap and show his fault because this idiot is going to crash into someone someday because of his own stupidity but then there is no point in doing that. If he was wise enough, he would never do this in the first place.

A biker had a head on crash while going on the wrong side few days back on the same road but others dont learn and continue to go on the wrong side.

To a certain extent I blame the cops partially for this because they dont catch/fine the offenders. These people break rules in front of them but the cops are more keen on regulating traffic. If they start fining these people or atleast catching them and making them wait for an hour or two, they will not break the rules and the kids too will see and learn that the lose in not following a rule is more than the gains in breaking a rule. If not, the kids are not going to value/respect the law enforcers and continue on the same path when they grow up.

I feel that its high time cops stop only regulating traffic and concentrate more on traffic offenders because when people start realizing that the traffic offenders are the reason for them getting late, they will either reprimand the offenders or atleast not be offenders themselves

[vigsom]

Originally Posted by sajo

majority of them , their children in tow, indulge in bad driving practices like :
- Not wearing seatbelts, helmets

Why the utter disregard for the system and its laws when it comes to road manners ? Convenience ?.

I wouldn't say convenience , but would say arrogance and indiscipline ;there aren't strict enough punishments meted out to offenders.Add to that the age old system of bribery and we have a society that couldn't care less for anything.

My wife and my son ride a scooter with helmets on; and other motorists look at them vaguely as the sight of a rider and the pillion rider , both donning helmets, is quite strange.

[itwasntme]

For insanely bad driving being directly taught to kids, just observe the rule violations near any major school. I fear for everyone's life during the school run because otherwise 'normal-looking' parents break every rule in the book just to save a few seconds!

[kutoos]

A good topic for discussion. To start off, let me be honest and confess that during several short trips i had resorted to wrong side driving and have been fined at some occassions as well. Realization dawned, rather in-your-face kinda, when one day i had to go out with my daughter to get some art items. As usual i did take the easiest recourse by driving on the wong side, My daughter was aghast and simply asked If you dont follow civic rules, Can i also skip folloiwng rules at home?

It was a slap on my face, What examples do we set. So there ended my sojourn with the wrong side of the law.

However, besides the moral point and being a good citizen, I've often wondered why do we do this?

The answer surprisingly is very simple. We live in confusing times, As illustrated above, the rule makers are the worst offenders:

1. During the evening rush hours, the cop opens an extra lane on the less crowded off-peak carriage-way. Being the ever opportunistic individual, if i can use it during peak, why not duing non peak?

2. The few precious seconds before the light changes, several times the cops wave us by inspite of the light being red. Red means stop right? Or is it Red means Go if you can and you have the blessing of a cop, or can it also mean, Go to hell?

3. Carriageways which have a continuous divider. Wow great idea, but this is more practical on highways where residential societies are almost non existent. The ingenuity of such dividers, make people travel all the way north and come back to the southern point. Effectively increasing the travel distance.

So to sum up, the above is no rant on the civic amenities or justificatiion of my actions. However rigidly we tend to adhere to teh side of righteousness, such chaos will one day make us break our vow.

It's like an addiction, till we get penalized severly, these activites will continue

[nitishk]

Originally Posted by sajo

It is incredible that how majority of them , their children in tow, indulge in bad driving practices like :
- Not stopping at red lights (extremely common)
- Driving/Riding on the wrong side (even more common)
- Not wearing seatbelts, helmets , and so on, the list is quite endless actually.

Couldnt agree with you more over here. I drop my daughter to school when I am in Kolkata and I see these things happening everyday.

Even If I stop at a red light, I get honked from an irate guy behind me, who thinks I am blind because the roads are empty and we are headed to school. This gives the drivers/parents de-facto right to break every signal.

Same goes for the 2-wheelers, apparently there are no rules and regulations for them. During school hours, these vehicles blatantly flout one-ways and drive without helmets. As a matter of fact, I had this discussion last week with my better half, about the examples parents are teaching their children.

Another fact which probably has not been mentioned(and I am guilty as well), we have the tendency to park our vehicles as close to the school as possible, needless to say when all parents want to do this, it leads to an unwanted chaos,blocking the whole lane.

Thankfully, my daughter's school has come up with some smart initiatives to avoid this, however sad to say the results remain yet to be seen.

[revharder]

Happens with me all the time.
In mornings, if I am among the first ones to reach & stop at the stop line on intersection, I'm usually among the last ones to move ahead.
Everyone with a school going kid in tow, leaves me in dust and cranes their cars'neck ahead of mine onto zebra crossing. Two wheeler riders with pillion kids are more smart; they go out till the maximum possible extent where vehicles from other lane are turning.

Originally Posted by nitishk

Thankfully, my daughter's school has come up with some smart initiatives to avoid this, however sad to say the results remain yet to be seen.

Sounds something interesting. Care to share please.

[shankar.balan]

In India, everyone is King. There is no fear of the law.
There is no law enforcement either.

And like someone said, mere literacy is no guarantee of "education".

This is a terrible example that these parents are setting for their kids, the next generation.

And we will suffer this new breed of brash and rash drivers for the rest of our lives.

[nitishk]

Originally Posted by revharder

Sounds something interesting. Care to share please.

Firstly the teachers are leading by example,they get off their vehicles on the main road, rather than entering the by-lane.

A PTM was called and parents were called to encourage car-pooling amongst students who were going to school in private vehicles.

The school is also planning an initiative to encourage "back-seat buddies" credit. Cars will be given priority stickers to pick/drop students and there is talk of giving some social work credit as well.

The school doesnt run a bus service, hence some parents have roped in OLA cabs, who have promised an air-conditioned bus with a gps-tracker and a female attendant(its a girls only school) if they get decent number of parents on-board.

Besides this the school has agreed to tweak timings by 15 mins to avoid school rush hour traffic(there are 2 other schools nearby with the same timings, so you can imagine the madness each morning.)

[vinit.merchant]

Quoting couple of quotes from my own posts from the past. I do not have anything to add to these.

The first one shows how people think in general.

Originally Posted by vinit.merchant

Anyone from Pune would know the torture on the four wheel drivers from the Two Wheel drivers. It is HELL here. Worse is the scene in main city areas (all Peths & Laxmi Roads). I never take my car there. Instead, I take a rick. Feel lucky if your car comes out scratchless off these areas.
Two wheelers rule the roads of Pune. They aint have any fear, whatsoever. If you tell them something like "bhaisab thoda dekh liya hota turn marne se pehle", you are sure to listen to some bad words and they are always ready for a small fight. Phew.

Now after marriage, I have stopped to even tell anything to them. Dont want my family to listen to all those crap they speak. No One would want that, right.

Aint this torture. It takes some time for me to cool my nerves after such instances. I have now learned to live with such traffic sense.

@ Gods-envy: Nothing, and I mean Absolutely nothing, can make such drivers learn lesson. Changing ones mentality is the most difficult of all, and one, two, even ten instances cannot do it.

Originally Posted by vinit.merchant

PS: OT but it saddens me to see people carrying kids on their two wheeler and giving no thought to the traffic rules - driving on wrong sides, breaking signals, etc, because kids learn what they see. I see it everyday here in Pune and I am sure it happens everywhere else in India. This is how the next gen is being groomed as far as traffic rules/driving sense is concerned

[sajo]

Originally Posted by vigsom

there aren't strict enough punishments meted out to offenders.

I say, the fines must be tripled if you are caught breaking a traffic rule with a child. Not only are they endangering the child's life, but also setting the wrong example.
The child can see plenty of other such "characters" if she just looks around her, and parents can do their bit to enforce their beliefs that these are just plain anti-socials.

[vinair]

Nothing can be more descriptive than this! Sheer brilliance and very, very apt to this thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opoGqpDfPAY

[Arjun Reddy]

Appreciate this thread. The time I spend with my son one on one while dropping him to school ( 10 mins) is priceless to me. I would encourage everyone to do it. Though I have a driver , (he would be cleaning my office going car at this time.) We have had some great conversations in this limited time. My son is now 11. He buckles up the minute we sit in the car , criticises people who jump the signal or come through in a no entry. Knows his crash ratings for almost every car on the Indian road ,Job done as a Team BHPian. Proud of it.

[dark.knight]

Originally Posted by centaur

This guy car pools and takes 4 others with him. To think of it, this guy is well educated (apparently but I prefer to call him literate than educated), is in a senior position in his firm and earns pretty well too but this is what he does once on the road.

We need to get back to the basics, the simple terms in my view. Education has little if not nothing to do with the way people behave, I'd define it as learning a specific set of skills, rules and/or knowledge to take up a trade and simultaneously become conformist blockheads since education limits their ability to assimilate the *now*. I've met many (dozens) of people for whom education has just been an excuse for displaying arrogance and yet they haven't done even half of the quality education I've received.

Literacy is only the ability to read, write, speak and respond to others.. but by being literate, it doesn't mean one has grasped the ability to interpret the truth from every statement or express the truth via every statement, it merely teaches one to express their own views (more often than not, deluded ones). Philosophy is a word that has been abused to a point where people don't know what it is, that's because philosophy evolved from its earliest definition of being a "fundamental knowledge arising out of existence" to the present definition of "what one feels", we have to blame literacy for contorting the meaning in this way. Likewise with the word mantra which originally meant holy incantations or prayer to again "way of life".

I believe in education and I believe that there is much to be learnt by reading or being interested in just about anything. Organised education taught me a lot, it taught me to express myself, gave me the capacity both to reason with and debate people and it gave me a specific set of skills so that I may make a living. The education itself has not stopped and never will, it works best only when clubbed with logic and truth.. both. My identity is as much my awareness, my ever-expanding knowledge and my thirst to know everything about everything, as is all else that physically defines me.

My point is when one makes the effort to separate wrong from right, to isolate facts from falsities and accept never to create nuisance for others, he/she will find their way to the right path every time. When driving each person has to be accountable to others and themselves, they should drive correctly because that's the only way to drive.. that the little ones shall also learn a good lesson out of that is only a bonus. Every person may have his/her own mantra or philosophy but in reality there is only one way to a conflict-free driving ecosystem - follow rules, PERIOD.

[shankar.balan]

Ha ha. Rakshasa Parents will make for Rakshasa Children too.

The saddest thing I see is the terrible attitude of parents these days, always pushing their kids to do this and do that, without teaching them real values.
But then, the value systems these parents subscribe to are mostly "money-led".
These self-same parents will take their International postings and take their kids with them and then, be forced to imbibe the rules and norms of the International societies that they land in - but only for a time. Because when they come back to dear old homeland, they will simply "revert to type" and very fast too!
Indians, as a race, only fear the "danda". Authority and strong enforcement, strong fines and fear works. No question of moderate, democratic "self-regulation" at all in these parts!
After all how can "demons" be forced to submit to "democracy"? They only subscribe to "demon-cracy"!