While brisk-walking one day, I noticed with my peripheral vision, a set of four wheels trying to catch up with me. I stopped. From behind a rolling window emerged a face, which I identified as something that often beamed at me. It belonged to a next-street neighbour, one of those familiar strangers you exchanged smiles with.
He ordered, “Hop in.”
Out of civility and partly out of fatigue — my morning walk, resumed after a decade, had gone too far, a weary 5 km from home — I obeyed him. Usually, I smile away such invitations to avoid the effort of having to make small talk.
When the drive ended, I realised I hadn’t had any conversation. On this occasion, however, I would have preferred small talk to the music player, which was the only one making any sounds. And these sounds were beyond my comprehension.
My neighbour had broken two unwritten rules. First, find out if you can switch on the music player. Two, find out if your fellow passenger can understand the contents of the playing CD.
You can’t blame him. Nobody seems to care about the dos and don’ts in a car anymore.
The sun visor in my car lacks a vanity mirror. The next model offered this ‘invaluable’ feature at a reasonable additional cost — Rs. 50,000. My fellow passengers however make do with the rear-view mirror. They yank it to a convenient angle, make faces at it, primp and preen and prettify themselves. That’s fine by me. But what isn’t is that they don’t twist the mirror back to its correct position. Whenever I need it badly, I can expect to find it turned out of position. Unless you are Superstar Rajinikanth, you need minutely-adjusted rear-view, side-view mirrors and any extra mirrors you care to fit in, for a scratch-free drive in Chennai, don’t you?
Life on Indian roads is built on trust, faith and lots of prayers. The ubiquitous ‘Baby On Board’ stickers often betray trust. For, invariably, cars with these stickers don’t have a baby. Instead, they have a baby +, a baby ++ or a baby +++. These arcane symbols represent passengers who were babies thirty, forty or fifty years ago. These stickers mislead, slyly getting unsuspecting road users to drive slowly, following all traffic rules. When they learn they have been tricked into driving safely, they lose faith in human nature and justice. I issue this plea on behalf of such disillusioned Indian road users: please remove these stickers if your children are no longer babies.
In certain areas of life, points of etiquette change. And people readjust their internal compass accordingly. However, car etiquette resists such adjustments. It is seldom understood and practised in the first place.
Take, for instance the question of whether to hold a car door for a lady or not. For two decades now, social scientists are wrestling with it. Dating guides take polar positions on it. Doctorates have come out of it. Yet, little light has been shed on it.
Sometimes, it’s better to live with a hard question. Especially when none of the answers even goes halfway towards answering it.
