Of Bad Driving…
It is a frustrating feature of my life to deal with bad drivers daily. So much so that some days, with the option to go to the office, I decide not to. The drive to and from is filled with such horror that the stress drains me of the energy and enthusiasm needed to make the schlep.
So I thought of exploring the reason people drive like they are on an exploration of an offroad track when driving on a concrete city road in India. I have been to a few corners of the world, and the experience of careless, wreckless, and almost impaired driving on Indian roads is unparalleled by my experiences of mad traffic trends anywhere. And I am not comparing with what is fancily called mad driving in New York.
After some exploration, I had an epiphany. Bad drivers are an evolutionary deviation of the human journey from the cave to the moon. These special people are born with unique genes that make their otherwise rational behavior disappear every time they get behind a steering wheel. If you ask the wise specialists in these matters, they will tell you that Driving is a complex behavior influenced by a variety of factors, including physical and cognitive abilities, experience, attention and decision-making, emotions, and personality traits, as well as environmental conditions such as road design and traffic. And you cannot blame a gene. But I disagree.
Let’s talk about bad parking. As more people learn to drive, it seems to me, that the quality of parking keeps going down. If you look at 10 cars parked, at least 4 or 5 of them will be parked crooked. At least one will have scratched your car on the way in, or out. Now, good parking needs a plethora of skills like spatial awareness, depth perception, hand-eye coordination, attention to detail, decision-making, patience, comprehension skills to understand the basic concepts of shapes, and common sense. The quality of parking I see around definitely indicates that most people are either inherently drunk or have an inherent predisposition to anarchy, or comprised skills that are genetically coded.
Now let’s consider the rare skill of driving in a straight line. Now there is a puzzle of nature, especially considering that our hard-earned money has been liquified as taxes consumed to paint lines on the road to designate lanes. Get on to any major road, where there is more than one lane or more than one lane, and after the encroachment of parking violators, you will see at least 50% of the traffic operating on imaginative and geospatially crooked lanes. And, what's worse, they do not seem to be in the mood to be confined to any designated, or imagined, lane for more than a few seconds. The distinct Discovery Channel videos on the motions of spermatozoa once let free from the warmth of the male body. Now, why would someone not be able to follow an elemental concept as a straight line? Either, half of car owners are high behind the wheel suffering the effects of potent psychedelics, or, there is a genetic code that compromises their ability to follow the axioms of straight-line motions.
Let’s try one more before I get too frustrated to even write about this growing nonsense. Have you been at the receiving end of suicidal overtaking? It typically follows a spell of honking because the driver behind you is either in a rush to get to his (or her) parents’ wedding vows to strangers, which was planned in secrecy that said driver just found out about. And they will overtake you like you don’t even exist or probably are a stone on the road that they are respectful to not trample over. And then there is a lack of sense of direction when people think it’s quite natural to overtake from the left or the right. And, were it not for the inability of automobiles to make Mario stunts, they would try over the roof too. I don’t have a dash cam, but if I did, the memes would almost be non-stop. Most people are not socialized to be psychopaths or suicidal. It’s proven that there is a genetic connection in the way the brain is wired. So such murderous and suicidal behavior can only be genetic.
So there you go. I am not sure if it is fertilizers in food or excessive UV exposure that is leading to genetic mutations making us suicidal, disorientated and demented, but every progressive generation seems worse off, if the quality of driving is a barometer.
