Life on Indian roads becomes more perilous than ever. While dug up roads and potholes are common knowledge, the new rules, smart policing, increased affluence and boom in vehicular numbers means that one has to adapt in ever different ways. Here are some driving skills you may need on today’s roads:

• Learn the art of sliding your cellphone into your shirt or bra with a deft movement of your chin, when a policeman is spotted on the horizon who can book you for talking while driving. This manoeuvre is particularly useful for parents of small children, whose kid has thrown the hands-free set into some inaccessible corner of the car or home.
• Learn the art of driving in peak summer with all the windows rolled up, just because you cannot bear to admit to your boss at a traffic light that your car AC has conked it/you have a non-AC car!
• Learn the art of swearing in the vernacular, whether it is Tamil, Telugu, Bengali or Hindi. When it comes to roundly describing offending pedestrians and drivers on the roads, English seems too feeble by half. Besides, it adds to the generally cheerful atmosphere during a particularly crowded evening, if two people shout insults at each other in their mother tongue, then leave as the lights change, without the necessity of taking it further.
• Learn the art of slipping on your seat belt, some four minutes after you head out for work, in the middle of speeding traffic, because you suddenly remembered the new seat-belt rule.
• Learn the art of zooming down some side lane, or ‘patli galli’ because you are in a hurry and there is a giant procession/wedding band/politician’s motorcade/traffic brawl blocking the road in front of you.
• Buy a master key for all those horrid police van locks with which they keep clamping your wheels, every time you have parked for five minutes in some busy city zone…

As you can see, some of these suggestions are taking us into dangerous territory. Perhaps you can add some driving suggestions of your own?

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