Bangalore Rules

While Bangalore does rule in more ways than one, its hegemony over the Indian IT-ICE sphere is not what this piece is about. Like I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m just a few days back from a driving trip to Kerala, and this time I decided to return via the erstwhile Garden City. The maps suggested that the distance was roughly the same as the usual route that I take, give or take a hundred kilometers. And I wanted to figure whether there had been any more work done on the Golden Quadrilateral road project since my dog-hit trip 9-months ago. And so on and so forth, with a few more reasons thrown in, including the lovely drive through the Wynad region. And that’s how I came to discover the Bangalore Rules.

Wynad proved to be as scenic as I’d imagined, though I wished that it was raining a whole lot more. I guess its still relatively early monsoon days as the roads were well above average quality. Crossing the Western Ghats, the weather made me wonder about whether it was monsoon at all bright, sunny and hot, although the red-water filled streams and rivers clearly told the story. And so it was that I approached the princely state of Mysore, and began circumambulating its ring road or whatever it is that the town bypass is called there. I’d heard much of the Bangalore-Mysore road, how it had been developed in readiness for the new infrastructure corridor that was part of the even grander plan of spreading ICE deeper and deeper into the Kannada hinterland. And my last drive down this particular route a couple of years ago had been rather bumpy and uncomfortable, so I was eager to try out the new version.

Strangely enough, the road signs began to become rather sparse, so there were a couple of instances where I wanted to double-check I was taking the right turns. But each time, a sign would obligingly come up a little later and reassure. And thus it was that I found myself out of the bypass and on the main Mysore Bangalore highway. And encountered the new rule!

One of the cardinal rules of long-distance highway driving is that you always overtake from the right of the vehicle ahead of you. So the code of conduct when you wanted to move ahead of the presumably slower moving vehicle before you was to lightly move to the right (when still behind the chap), confirm that there wasn’t a vehicle rapidly approaching from the opposite direction (in which event you proceeded to smartly move back to the left and waited for the oncoming vehicle to pass), else toot your horn to tell the chap ahead you were going to pass him (lest he decided to suddenly swerve to the right, perhaps to savor the view or to pick some flowers or whatever) and then with whatever acceleration that your vehicle was capable of providing, to begin overtaking. The above procedure is for the normal 2-lane Indian road. On a nice 4-laner like the Mysore-Bangalore highway, you had 2-lanes in each direction, so the guideline is that the slower moving vehicles stay in the left lane, allowing the right to be used by the zippier types. Thus, if you encountered a slower mover in the right-lane, you tooted the horn, he slowly proceeded to move to the left on an asap basis and allowed you to pull ahead. I hope I haven’t confounded you my gentle reader? Anyway, this is what I’d been encountering all through my 3500-km of driving on this trip till then. And then I found a bus ahead of me in the right-lane of the nice 4-lane Mysore-Bangalore highway, and politely tooted.

And then tooted again. And then again, a little less politely. And then again, rather long and rudely. For all this tooting was having no impact. And then proceeded to pull left, just to check if the bus himself trying to overtake another even slower moving vehicle. This is not really a healthy thing to do in our left-hand drive vehicles, as you need to entirely switch lanes to see the left lane, sitting as you are in the left of the vehicle. So if there happens to be a slow moving vehicle ahead of the vehicle ahead of you, you’d find yourself almost inside his exhaust pipe! So performed the above maneuver with some trepidation and to my utter consternation found that not just the lane ahead but the road ahead was completely empty! And even more mysteriously, found myself being honked at by a car that had come up behind me, when I’m in the left lane!!

Almost by instinct, I found myself pulling to the right, which under normal circumstances is wrong, upon which the car behind proceeded to zoom ahead from the left. Weird! Given that the bus ahead was displaying no inclinations of moving to the left, I too stopped tooting and proceeded to overtake from the left, as there were still no slow moving vehicles in the left lane. Hmmm, probably just one of those things I thought, as I went ahead and found slow moving vehicles who were pretty much staying in the left lane where they belong, just a bus driver with an attitude.

And then it happened again, with a mini-bus! I didn’t honk as much as the first time, and when it became apparent that this was the younger brother of the bus-driver, I proceeded to speed ahead from the left. Then again and again and again, trucks, tempos, buses, even an over-sized 3-wheeler who at the best could manage 60-kmph stripped down to its chassis, all of these worthies were staying in the wrong right lane with the conviction of a Brahmin hanging on to his sacred thread! Overtaking from the left can be a little more hazardous and a whole lot more trouble on our roads, the vehicles in that lane being the slowest moving of the lot, so I was progressively getting more and more irritable over the 90-some kms leading into Bangalore. And as I neared the city, it just kept getting worse, with 2-wheelers now jumping into the fray and driving right on the median line between the lanes and the congestion getting worse. I finally gave up trying to follow any rules, decided to go with the flow and follow the traffic patterns, swerve as best as I could, put in whatever bursts of speed that a diesel engine could provide as and when required in general, drive in a terribly obnoxious and unpredictable fashion! It seemed to work, and I finally got to where I was headed to, well inside the city.

Two days later, the self-same pattern repeated itself when I left Bangalore to return to Slumbay! And lasted for about 70-80 kms out of Bangalore diminishing as the distance increased. By now, I was aware of the rule and thus looking for patterns - the principal offenders were Bangalore vehicles, the larger ones tended to have correspondingly sized attitudes and the passenger buses were the worst. The out-of-state buses were uniformly well-behaved, hardly ever resorting to this belligerence. Even further away, there was still the occasional bus that persisted in this behavior, and I caught myself muttering about how I’d like to have had found him in Maharashtra, where I’d have pulled ahead and stopped him on the road and abused him! Responding to belligerence with belligerence, hmmmmm!

This reversal of the good driving rules in the city is something everyone knows you only have to get off the Bombay-Poona Expressway in Panvel to see it operating. Within the city, its impossible to overtake from the right, that being reserved for the decrepit Bombay taxis that putter along shedding bits and pieces as they go. But on a long-distance highway, for a distance of 70-80 kms is something that was a first for me. And considering that I’m a frequent traveler on the coastal Karnataka roads, where I’ve never encountered something like this was the reason that I felt that this has more to do with Bangalore hence Bangalore Rules!

I guess this is reflective of the schizophrenic behavior of the Bangalore Kannadiga on the one hand, proud of the international stature of the city, and at the same time, deeply resentful of his negligible role and share in the economic pie. In my opinion, Bangalore had always demonstrated a parochial streak that I remember from the time I’ve studied there nearly 2 decades ago auto-drivers who had then refused to acknowledge Hindi, the under-the-breath cursing of immigrants from neighboring states and so on. It seems to be there, and if anything, gaining voice and volume, as is happening in Gurgaon for instance, which is another city that seems to have come up almost overnight and is growing by the day.

But that would take me onto a different and perhaps more philosophical tangent, which is not the intention of this piece. So let me end by reminding anyone who plans to drive into Bangalore be prepared for the Bangalore Rule, beginning about 100-km from the city. Happy driving!! :o)