Driven crazy

The death last week of a 35-year-old radiologist, Amit Diwan, from injuries suffered during a road-rage attack has thrown into relief the insanity, chaos, pandemonium and evil tempers that reign on the capital's roads.

Psychiatrists are warning of mounting levels of road rage. At the slightest provocation, drivers rain blows on one another.

The amazing thing is not the existence of road rage but that the roads are not rivers of blood. The driving is enough to arouse homicidal fury.

First-time visitors are usually stunned. No one observes lane discipline, most jump red lights and no one looks before swinging out from a side street on to the main road.

People drive the wrong way up one-way streets, drive the wrong way down dual carriageways, and everyone overtakes on the left. Scooter drivers weave in an out of traffic as though they are performing circus stunts.

And I haven't even mentioned the cows meandering all over the place.

Every driving rule is trampled on. It's carte blanche. Anarchy. You are free to do as you wish. A truck driver on a dual carriageway who realised that he was travelling in the wrong direction last week just did a U-turn and started driving against the traffic. A fast-moving car crashed into him, and its young driver died.

Actually, I lie when I say no rules are observed. Three rules - peculiar to India - are observed. Rule No 1 is 'survival of the biggest'. That means that trucks and buses swagger all over the place, pushing smaller vehicles out of the way. Rule No 2 is 'abhor a vacuum': if you see a centimetre of empty space, hurtle towards it even if you are going to be only an inch closer to a red light. Rule No 3 is honk as often and as unthinkingly as you blink.

The universal impatience and aggression on display are enough to make tempers flare. Every driver in New Delhi, it seems, is a psychotic running late for an appointment.

If a driver, when the light turns green, is slow to move off by a fraction of a second, a cacophony of angry honking will break out from everyone behind.

Part of the problem is the sheer volume of cars. India's economic boom has given the growing middle class plenty of money to splurge. The number of vehicles on the road has risen dramatically in recent years, with around 4 million at present - more than Mumbai, Calcutta, and Chennai combined.

About 600 new cars are added every day.

But many of the men who work as drivers have never been to driving school. They have just picked up how to drive by driving.

The only way of dealing with the madness is to go with the flow, while mentally switching to fatalistic mode.