Highway Star

Nobody's gonna take my car, I'm gonna race it to the ground
Nobody's gonna beat my car, It's gonna break the speed of sound
Ooooh it's a killing machine, It's got everything
Like a driving power big fat tires everything

Deep Purple sang this song thinking they were so special ... they were so wrong !

You come down to any Indian road, and you don't just see one lunatic who thinks he's a highway star, you see a the whole freakin galaxy !!!

Seriously, it's a known fact that Indians have absolutely no traffic sense. Unfortunately I think that's just a mild way of putting it and more so, dismissing it lightly.

But putting the more obvious suicidal and murderous tendencies of the drivers aside ... I have come across a more peculiar observation. It's like this - I'm going down in my car in this narrow lane probably meant for bicycles, and there's a car coming from the opposite side as well. Now I know I can bank my car next to the paan-waala allowing just-enough room for the other guy to pass through just barely. But I can see even the other guy has a place close to him just like that. Now, for more birth-related reasons (namely : I'm Indian), I don't bank next to the paan waala and think, due to some psychopathic reasons, that the other guy would stop. But ofcourse, due to the same birth-related reasons, he doesn't stop as well. So now we end up stuck headlight-to-headlight in ... a glaring competition !!!

Oh yes, that's what I am talking about - The Glare. Almost anybody who's been on Indian roads on any mode knows exactly what I'm talking about. It's the deadening-frozen glare that u get from the person sitting behind the wheel telling you that you're an idiot and you don't have any road-manners and probably were abducted as a kid and also should be whisked away now. It's the glare which says "What the hell are u doing man !". It kinda reminds me of the way the profs in MDI used to look at me after I'd just woken up from my mid-lecture nap.

But this one's especially amazing. That's because I know that the person giving me the glare is probably as inept at understanding traffic rules and is a mass murderer of traffic sense and rules himself. But still ... there's the glare !

I've gotten ga-zillion glares from uncles, drivers, shorties, one-foot-in-the-grave old women and even a 13 year old ! Well I had to peep down onto the driver's seat to get the last glare.

Earlier I used to glare back. You know the drill, be a man on the road, don't let your guard down and all that crap. But now I just smile. It's loads of fun, you should try it. Next time you get a glare from the man with the bushy mustache because u turned a little too fast into him, give him a nice big smile. Even show your teeth if you have to. That just turns that glare into a gaze - confounded, extremely.

Nobody's gonna take my car...
I'm a highway star, I'm a highway star.