My ancestors came from Japan. I was born in Gurgoan near Delhi. When I came onto the Indian roads there were only the old dilapidated cousins of mine who traced their roots to distant Italy or England. They were so old that they could hardly run on the roads; yet they were being whipped to do their work, which they did very faithfully. I was a great attraction in the beginning. I looked cute and I had a long line of waiting suitors those days. The Indian dowry system works in the opposite direction in my case. In addition to the usual dowry amount, which in itself was very heavy, my suitors used to pay black money to get me, out of turn. They even prostituted me, at times. I used to have many suitors at a given time. Even when I was done with my first husband, I had a great demand in the olden days. People paid almost the same dowry amount to repurchase me in the open market!



All that has changed after the liberalization policy of the Indian government. Lot of my kith and kin from Japan, amounting almost to a whole Japanese Diaspora into India, my first cousins from Korea, and even my distant cousins from Italy and Germany have invaded the Indian markets in a big way and there are many others wanting to get in. They all like the Indian dowry system and the sheer numbers of suitors in the affordable middle class market in India. But the number of lovers I used to have in the good old days has dried up now. Could this be due to more beautiful cousins getting into the market with shapely figures? I no longer have the long queue of men waiting to woo me. To make matters worse there is a beautiful young Indian maiden ready to compete with all of us. She has an edge over most of us both in dowry, which is very low, compared to us, in addition to her being more attractive. She is very well endowed, coming as she does from a purely Indian stock, having no foreign blood. With her coming on to the scene the Indian men seem to be fascinated by her and despite all of us here to be wooed, men and even women are waiting in long queues to get her. Come to think of it, there is a lot of homosexuality in India in this field at least. Lots of young ladies try to befriend us on the road! While some men are very caring and look after us very well with tender loving care, yet others are downright rude and crude in their lovemaking. They want us to come fast; they do not care for our comforts and needs.



Up until the Indian lady came on the scene, my Indian parents really fleeced the people of India by charging exorbitant rates of dowry for me. They even robbed the poor men. Now that Indian girl’s rate has come down, our parents have realized that they could no longer fool the public by their bloated prices, and have cut the dowry rates drastically. It is no longer the sellers’ market, but predominantly a buyers’ market. There are also the elder cousins of ours, the buses and the larger trucks that have invaded the Indian market in a big way lately. Some of them are so big that they look like monsters on the fifteenth century Indian roads. They have become a real menace to smaller players like me on the road. There is an inverse-law operating here. Whereas the Indian roads have hardly changed since the eighteenth century, the vehicles that invade India today are the twenty-first century makes!



The Indian roads are a nightmare for me almost everyday. My man is a resident of this beautiful coastal district of Udupi, where most Indian Gods and Goddesses have come to stay. It must have been a safe haven for all of them in the good old days. People here must have been good too in the distant past. Not any more, though! The way they behave with frail ladies like me on their roads makes me feel, at times, that they are not human at all. They come out with all their demonic features while on the road. If they sit at the wheel of one of those juggernauts, they could not care less for the lesser mortals. To cap it, this part of the country has a very liberal supply of their intoxicant, the arrack, which has become a pre-requisite for driving large vehicles. You hardly find a driver who has not had his fill of this heavenly liquid before climbing on to the driver’s seat. In essence arrack is more important for the drivers than the diesel for their vehicles.



I shall now narrate a nightmarish experience that I had on the main highway in this part, the NH 17, running between Mangalore, the port city of Karnataka, and Udupi the Temple City. It was mid day and the sun was unusually hot. On my way up I had witnessed three gruesome accidents where the huge giants themselves had kissed one another head on like the Clinton-Monica kiss, described by the latter as the most intimate and pleasing. Next was the somersault of another lorry, which must have sent its driver to meet his maker without any hitch! The third was really queer. The bus had tried to go up a roadside tree. The poor tree was all but uprooted, but had sacrificed its life to save at least the majority of human beings inside the large bus. The tree showed the true Indian spirit of “paropakaaraartham idam shareeram”, while the bus and its driver were swearing by the opposite slogan “ paraapakaaraartham idam shareeram”. The latter seems to be the slogan of the large bus cousins of mine on the NH 17. They are there mainly to kill people. I strongly feel that the government departments, looking after the transport system, must have sent a secret circular to kill as many people on the roads as possible and as quickly as possible, to reduce the exponential growth of the population!



Corruption being the order of the day, no one seems to bother about the rules and traffic regulations on these roads. Indians are said to be literate and this district is supposed to have one hundred per cent literacy, but the way they behave on the road looks as if they have no culture at all. Rules are obeyed because of fear of punishment; culture makes one obey the rules because of the sheer love for others. Uncultured people in India need not bother about the rules at all. If you know which palms to grease at the appropriate time you could easily get away with even murder. In the adversarial judicial system that we have inherited from the British, if one could engage the cleverest lawyer in town to make the truth look respectable and murder acceptable, one could get away with the worst crime. These people could even give solidity to pure air! Consequently, the drivers of these large vehicles commit any number of mistakes, including fatal accidents, but they will be at the wheel the following day. I had a taste of that yesterday while my husband was driving me mad on the NH 17. We just escaped death by the skin of our teeth thrice between Udupi and Mangalore. Once it was an oncoming bus trying to overtake two vehicles at a bend in the road where the overtaking driver could hardly see beyond 100 yards ahead of him! We were very lucky, as we had no gutter on the left edge of the road and there was a large road shoulder at that spot. Next was the large bus trying to overtake us while we had signaled to turn right. While we just about brushed with death in that instance, the driver of the bus abused us in the filthiest language telling us that we have flouted his new rule that the signal to the right means our permitting him to overtake us. This seems to be the modern addition to the Indian penal code! This kind of a rule does not hold good in any other part of the civilized world! Third time it was the driver of a fast moving bus coming to a dead stop right in the middle of the road to pick up a passenger on the roadside, although it claimed to be a non-stop express bus.



Of course, stopping a vehicle at the entrance to a side road, at the convexity of a bend in the road, in the middle of the road, in front of some other parked vehicle, in front of someone’s house, in a round-about, and in all the prohibited areas is supposed to be a sign of greatness in India. Indulgent sons of wealthy parents, drivers of large buses, and the official drivers of the great government babus are the ones who follow this parking dictum without fail. No one dare talk to them. He is sure to suffer for it. One can not complain to the police, either. It is a sight for the Gods to watch an occasional altercation between the bus driver and the poor police constable. It is an unequal argument with the poor policeman, at the receiving end. The driver always has his way, using some of the chaste adjectives aimed at the policeman, because the driver knows that the latter is on his maamuul and, literally, lives on it. Less said about it the better for society.



Maamuul culture has become a rule rather than an exception in every field, no part of the plutocratic government being an exception to this golden rule. The transport authorities issue licenses on pressure, and the drivers drive their vehicles under pressure from the owners to make more money. At the end of the day it is money that runs this world. All the rules are bent to suit the moneymaking tricks. With the monetary economy getting entrenched, society changed its moorings and has lost all the virtues enshrined on it by the tenets of the religious leaders of yore in every religion. There are no bad religions, there are only bad people making a living out of twisting religious tenets. In this context a peep into our ancestry may not be out of place.



Time was when the golden rule of the business in motor cars, nay in any other area, was basically a loving relationship between the maker and the buyer who needed the article. He had to wait for it to be manufactured to his specifications from the manufacturer. Enter Henry Ford (1863-1947) into this business in the year 1908, and the whole scene changes to that of mass production. This resulted in cars being manufactured in thousands and they had to look for a market. They had to make people buy cars even when they did not need them. Although this goes against the Ten Commandments of a great thinker, who said: “never buy anything that you do not need and also do not buy anything without your having the money in hand”. The new business philosophy changed all that and made people buy things which they did not need and also to buy now and pay later. This seems to have been one of the major causes of the modern epidemic of suicides in the West.



Henry Ford had to get his friends in the government to build bigger roads to accommodate the larger load of cars and also to start motor financing in a big way. Earlier in the year 1885 the German inventor, Karl Benz (1844-1929) announced his motor wagon, a single-cylinder petrol engine, and the tricycle. Cars became the toys and status symbol for the rich; in fact it is so even now for the newly rich. The real break through came in 1906 when Rolls-Royce produced their Silver Ghost. But my real ancestor is the brainchild of a great Greek-born thinker technocrat, Sir Alexander Issigonis, who when employed by the British Motor Corporation after the Suez crisis in 1959 to innovate a fuel friendly small car, came up with the transverse engine space saving and fuel friendly Austin Mini in the year 1959. It was the real birth of a small car.



We did not look back since then and even the American market is now competing for the small cars. That is how Japan overtook the American giant even in this business. America is paying very heavily for its mistake by way of pollution from petrol and diesel. India can not lag behind, as many literate Indians are only RNIs, resident non-Indians. They think with the American mind, sitting in their air-cooled drawing rooms in our mega cities, least mindful of, neither even aware of, the ground realities in our far-flung villages. There are, in all, about 575,000 villages in India, where more than 80% of Indians live in a hand to mouth existence.



Acculturation, migration of populations in search of greener pastures, to larger cities is our biggest curse. That has resulted in unmanageable congestion in our cities that adds to the traffic pollution. Our roads are still the same with potholes and badly maintained narrow lanes. They would surely find it impossible to accommodate the new wave of vehicles driving madly all over them. The NH17 is a very good example of what a road should not be. If I did survive yesterday it was definitely due to my good Indian horoscope. Logically and rationally, according to the linear mathematics, I should have been smashed into bits and pulverized under one of those large monsters on the highway. We do not pass a day without deaths and disability produced on the NH 17. Is it the only jinxed road or are all roads in India potentially the dangerous deathtraps?



God saves mankind! In their madness for comfort and their greed they will eventually destroy themselves. Oh God, if you are still on duty do something before it is too late. You will certainly repent for having not put that one stitch in time! I hope my progeny, at least, would have wider and safer roads and more sane husbands to manage. Hope to see a new breed of bus and truck owners who are needy but not greedy, and the drivers of the larger monsters who are human and humane.



The dead are only a statistic for the police and the government, but they are one hundred per cent irreparable loss for the near and dear ones. All that the latter could do is to keep the memory of the dead alive and love them as long as they live. After all there are two worlds, one of the living and another of the dead. There is a bridge between the two. That is the bridge of human love. Let us love our departed souls as long as we live. Let us hope that our roads will not be used to send more people to meet their makers in heaven! Would man see reason and act with compassion? Let us pray for that day and live on hope till then. Man lives on hope, anyway.