Horn OK Please !

The roads in Mumbai are divided. It is also true for all major cities in India. The divide is very sharp and contrasted between the haves and have-nots. I am not talking about the hordes of beggars and unfortunate shelter-less people and the ones driving by in their cushy limousines.

I am referring to the two broad categories that are unleashed on the roads of this maximum city almost every day: the ones who honk and the ones who don’t.

When man started the process of invention of the automobile or the earlier horse drawn carriage to be precise, the horn preceded the engine ! So there was this horse drawn carriage in mid seventeenth century with a loud bugle to warn off the pedestrians that the carriage is on its way. Many many years later, and after experimenting with thousand of variations we have today what is called as the electric motor horn.

In countries like India , with the roads ever congested, sometimes it is like you can drive perhaps with a cranky engine but you cannot take the vehicle out if the horn is not in perfect order. You do not know when you need it next !

On the roads we have a category of drivers who think that honking loudly and repeatedly will give them instant way and all the traffic jams will be a thing of the past. So when you have scores of cars lined up in front of you trying to navigate through the roads like a thousand footed centipede and you cannot afford to step on the accelerator, what do you do ? Honk of course !!

Then there is the other variety who thinks that once you have honked the responsibility of saving his or her life rests with the pedestrian and it is immediate right of way for them.

The third variety is those who can see the counter at the signal counting down to zero to turn from red to green but feel that honking a few times may actually speed up the laboriously slow method of down counting to zero.

Some use the horns for everything- whether it is for reversing the car or to signal to the friend or relative vigorously waving goodbye on the sidewalk or to just say hello to your friend who is in the next lane in the traffic snarl- just to give company on a boring day…

It is not for nothing that we have graffiti on trucks – Horn OK Please ! Time as a nation we patented this phrase as it amply sums up what we do on the roads.