Of reckless drivers and overcrowded vehicles!
By: Peer Faizan Bashir.
In the days of yore, people would travel miles by feet. They would even carry a heap of load along. A little progress and we had invented a mysterious object- a wheel which revolutionized human life and now we began pulling carts for carrying goods from one place to other. Then came the horse driven carts and so on.
After some time mans inquisitiveness surfaced again and now he no longer felt comfortable with the way horses he had conducted himself for centuries. This led to the invention of engines and subsequently cars, buses and trains etcetera. The automobile was such a great invention that man now had the best possible invention to not only speed up his travels but also to forget about carrying any head loads.
We have been using vehicles since ages now — be it for personal or commercial purposes—but it has now come with its own pros and cons and while there is a great comfort to be enjoyed, the risks inherent can’t be ignored altogether. Running our vehicles at bullet-speeds, exhaust fumes and noise pollution besides clogged roads from ever-increasing traffic is a crisis we are grappling with nowadays.
This Monday morning, I had a narrow escaped with death along with many co-passengers! I was travelling from Srinagar to Baramulla in a Sumo with a reckless driver on the wheels. My heart still pounds with the dread I faced when the vehicle nearly turned turtle on a blind curve as the driver was chasing other vehicles at a high speed only to fetch more passengers ahead of others.
Boys riding two-wheelers, though not in a race to earn more bucks like Sumo drivers, are no exception when it comes to reckless driving on the roads. Youth performing stunts & maneuvering through the crowds to impress passers-by is a common sight these days. They don’t care when people yell at them: “Look at the lunatics set off to commit suicide.”
Postscript: Carts were a sign of human development— vehicles were astounding. They were to ease our difficulties of travelling on foot. But, alas, instead there are people among us who, just for the sake of their adrenal rush, have been risking not just their lives but the lives of others as well.
We need to understand and make people aware of the dangers of such reckless driving. In fact, am entire department has been vested with this responsibility and yet some lunatics escape all eyes and continue doing crazy things on the roads. It is unfortunate but one has to say that every dog has his day!
The author is pursuing Graduation. [email protected]
