Satire | What makes Delhi roads the deadliest of ’em all? Hint: it walks on four legs

No other city offers the unique challenge that Delhi does

We keep getting these rankings of cities. India’s top 10 cleanest cities, top 100 smartest cities, top 500 dumbest cities, etc. But there is one list I would really like to see: India’s toughest cities to drive in. 

Given that this is a matter of great pride and known to trigger heated arguments that often end with someone punching someone in the face, I’m surprised there are no demands for the government to come up with official rankings so that the debate can be settled in a non-violent way. In the absence of official data, all we have to go by are objective impressions — that is to say, my impressions.

For the longest time, because I grew up listening to my father ranting about it, I thought Chennai was the toughest. Appa made it sound like driving in Chennai was more hazardous than stabbing yourself 32 times before jumping into a pool of overweight sharks trying out intermittent fasting — you may survive, but you are at the mercy of forces you do not control or understand. 

He felt most aggravated by the bikers, who were both colour blind and blind as a bat, followed closely by the bus drivers who betrayed no awareness of the fact that the vehicle they were piloting was not a go-kart but a tin box too fat for our thin roads and too long for the turning radii on offer. But the worst of the lot, according to him, were the auto-rickshaw drivers, who had the road sense of a wild buffalo on  ganja-charas.

I had assumed my father’s take to be the gospel truth until I began to meet people from other Indian cities with roads and moving vehicles. I find Bengalureans the funniest. For some reason, not only do they have strong opinions on the matter, they seem to imagine that their opinions matter. I think it’s just blind pride which makes them forget that their beloved city doesn’t meet one of the two eligibility criteria for entering the competition: moving vehicles.

Mumbaikars are weird in their own way. They have this compulsion to engage in one-upmanship with Delhi on everything, which doesn’t help in this context because Mumbai, too, like Bengaluru, doesn’t meet the eligibility criteria: while it does have, I admit, moving vehicles, it has no roads. 

Just get on a plane and fly over the city. All you will see are buildings, railway tracks and directions. Every part of the city comes equipped with its own directions — East and West — but that’s it. No roads. Okay, they do have one road: the Bandra-Worli sea link, which, it’s true, has had its fair share of accidents. But one road does not make a city a driver’s nightmare any more than one swallow makes a drunkard.