Issue 5: Driving Cars for Cowards
A Crisis in No Crashes
These days, I need to have the lights on at night when I go to sleep. There’s a mosquito in my room which clones itself right before I squash it dead. It buzzes in my ears each time my eyelids begin to fall shut, driving me crazy. Most of my body is under a blanket, which leaves my face open to bloodsucking from all angles. The only way to keep the mosquito away is to ensure the tubelight glow covers my head.
This got me thinking about how many mosquitoes I’ve killed over 25 years of my life. “Mosquitoes annoy everyone”— can a more universal statement be made in today’s polarised times? It is said that historically, around 5% of all humans who’ve ever lived died due to disease-carrying mosquito bites. The average lifespan of a mosquito varies between 10-30 days, while the average lifespan of an Indian is around 70 years. For creatures with such short lives, however, they can be surprisingly hard to get rid off: especially if (a) they’re part of a large gang or (b) still not chubby from all the blood they’ve extracted.
The easiest (and most colourful) kind of mosquito to murder is therefore, a lonely, greedy insect barely able to fly even when pushed along, so content it is with being full.
And that is at the heart of another dilemma I face: that of driving.
As is obvious from the picture above, I’m a newly approved driver of non-commercial (personal) 4 wheelers. Which is a sweet thing. It gives me the ability to traverse great distances in a way that is self-sufficient, for the first time in my life. I’ve further considered the benefits of having the vehicle itself, if I’m homeless and require shelter from adverse weather. There’s also the purely marvelous feeling that at any time but right now, ‘comfortable’ life just wouldn’t be this cheap for this many (no matter how privileged that sounds).
But as someone who’s mostly a quintessential middle class Bangali, the mere fact that I could be a little less pompous, plan my outdoor movements on public transportation and ultimately end up saving myself the expense of skyrocketing petrol prices and my locality the cost of pollution makes me sigh, albeit with a smile. The comfort that a car brings puts me in the shoes of the fat mosquito, scared I’ll become reliant on using the vehicle to travel to nearby neighbourhoods, too smugly secure in a moving cocoon, too damn self-satisfied for my own liking. Obviously, simply getting a license means none of this; it’s just one more addition to a modern-day skillset.
There’s an additional secret new entrant to my arsenal of skills, though, that of being able to kill someone by ‘accident’. Let me elaborate. Around 1,50,000 Indians died in a road accident in 2019, approximately the same as the number of Indians who died due to the coronavirus until now. What’s special about this is that these deaths on the road, apparently accidental in nature, consist of physically harming a 3rd party.
Unless one is a murderer or had intent to kill (through whichever tricky procedure), the only way we end someone else’s life is by accident. The pie chart above shows how miniscule the impact is of most other causes of accidental death. Dying in a fire, by drowning or perhaps through electrocution has an element of public tragedy, a consequence of facing off against nature/infrastructure, and is a relatively far lower occurrence compared to a loss of life due to traffic accidents.
You might think it unfair to single out road accidents in the way I am, but it actually makes sense cruising through the logic: more often than not, road accidents can be easily averted by taking precautions, alongside not being negligent in adhering to traffic rules. Imagine I’m in the driver’s seat after having rammed my car into a bystander/another car. At best, I can argue that the other party was the one to blame for the mishap, but the reasons will be the same on the other end. In other words, very rarely is a road accident truly ‘accidental’ in nature. We can claim that it was, ultimately, a result of negligent foolishness— “I never thought this would happen.” My point is that, whatever be the final explanation, it is a far more personal, direct, face-to-face, one-to-one method of enacting death on a populace. If more of us were alert to the dangers of the freedom that our own vehicle brings, there’d be more of us. We have categorised this ultra-modern manner of extinguishing a life (of course, many died covering large distances on horseback or ship in past centuries, but they were natural risks) during our travels ‘road accidents’, which is perhaps expectedly, necessarily cute.
For how else are we accounting for the extra traffic jam, pollution and overpopulation sourced from the technological luxuries of the industrial age, if not by making the truth—
1. of mowing down fellow strangers (reducing population numbers),
2. of driving over-cautiously for the rest of our lives,
3. of serving as a reminder to develop cleaner cars (diminishing pollution),
4. of blindly continuing to purchase/ride our own vehicles
palatable?
Lastly, look at the dates on that license. It’ll be functional for 15 years, right up until the date of my 40th birthday (7th February, 2036). It’s hilarious to stare at an ID that’s going to remain solidly valid regardless of my fluctuating fortunes, or whether I’ll even be alive until then. The presence of that date nurtures a self-driven optimism. AI-utilising driverless cars might make many of these concerns vanish. Every year, algorithms could approximately save a preposterous 1.35 million people from such deaths. Will my sweet-tongued AI assistant be appearing for a license exam next time?
I’m also hoping I’ll be as difficult to get rid off as the mosquito buzzing in my room right now. They say those who adapt, survive— and haven’t I’ve already become a hunter (driver) from my earlier status as a gatherer (walker)? After all, I have the power to change the destinies of all I cross on the road, a license to kill, if you will.