Remember Alistair Pereira? Late one night in November 2006, this 21-year-old businessman had some drinks and then decided to drive his Toyota Corolla on Carter Road in Mumbai’s Bandra neighbourhood. He ran over and killed seven construction workers who were sleeping on the side of the road.
The list of drivers who drink and then kill others just got a new entry: Janhavi Gadkar. Late on Monday night, this 35-year-old lawyer drank some liquor at the Marine Plaza Hotel on Mumbai’s Marine Drive, and then decided to drive home to Chembur in the city’s eastern suburbs. Only, she decided to drive on the wrong side of the Eastern Freeway. She ran into a taxi, killing two people in it and injuring four others. (Her Audi’s airbags deployed, saving her life).
Pereira’s seven, and Gadkar’s two: nine more who have given their lives to contribute to this sobering, dispiriting statistic – every four minutes on our roads, day in and day out, we kill another fellow-Indian.
'I was drunk'
We have laws against drunk driving, as we all know well. Gadkar knew it too, even while drunk. For she apparently sat in her car on Marine Drive for two hours, waiting for the intoxication to wear off. Only then did she set out for home. But of course it hadn’t worn off. In her statement to the police, she actually said, “As I was drunk, I was not able to understand the road.”
These tragedies set off so many trains of thought that it’s hard to follow them all coherently. But let’s see:
*Certainly drinking impairs your judgement, so asking why Gadkar decided to drive at all that night may be a futile question. She thought, in her befuddled state, that she was capable of driving home. That’s all.
But here’s the infuriating and tragic conundrum. At least to start with, she actually knew she wasn’t capable. This is why she waited two hours. If she could think clearly enough to wait, why didn’t she think it through a little more and spend the night somewhere in town, perhaps even at the hotel? Why not park the Audi somewhere and take a taxi home? Why did the friends she was with not offer to either have her stay with them or drive her home? (What kind of friends are these who would leave Gadkar to drive home inebriated?)
*Did Gadkar and Pereira think drunk-driving laws – whether letter or spirit – did not apply to them? What other explanation is there for their flouting the fundamental idea of such laws: if I drink, whatever the amount, I must not drive, period? (A specified level of intoxication is really just gravy). What gives people like these notions like these?
*After Pereira’s crime, various people sought to defend him on various grounds, each more specious than the other. One of these was an Anjum Samel. He wrote a letter to the press suggesting that the real criminals were the people Pereira ran over. The city, he wrote, “has become one big orphanage and the migrants keep pouring in”. He wanted the Motor Accidents Tribunal to “take cognisance of whether the victims have transgressed the law” by sleeping on pavements. If so, they had to be punished. (What punishment he had in mind, meaning beyond Pereira killing them, he didn’t specify).
So far at least, there’s no similar attempt to deflect the blame in Gadkar’s case onto her victims. But Samel’s theorising is familiar indeed. It also serves to deliberately muddy the issue. After all, even if they should not have been sleeping there, Pereira broke the law by driving drunk, and then broke it again by killing those seven people. Period.
*Unsaid but implied in Samel’s theorising is something else that is familiar: the laws of the land are really for someone else, not for me. Thus: There should be laws against drinking and driving, but I’ll drive drunk when I want. There should be municipal rules to get people to scoop up their dogs’ poop, but no way am I going to do it myself. Others must obey traffic signs, but I’ll drive the wrong way on a one-way street when it’s convenient for me.
How many of us have confronted wrong-way drivers, only to have them offer this face-palmer: “But I live here!” What’s there to say, really?
Finally: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Swachh Bharat” campaign has run into plenty of scepticism because it doesn’t seek to address fundamentally wrong-headed attitudes towards cleanliness and littering. (Like: “I can drop my garbage in this public spot, because cleaning it up isn’t my problem but someone else’s.”) Until those change, you know this will remain a dirty, polluted country.
In much the same way, there are plenty of fundamentally wrong-headed attitudes towards our laws of the road. (Like: “I will drive the wrong way on this street because my kid is late for school.”) Until those change, you know our roads will remain unsafe deathtraps.
Until every one of us acknowledges: If the laws are not for me, they are for nobody.
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The list of drivers who drink and then kill others just got a new entry: Janhavi Gadkar. Late on Monday night, this 35-year-old lawyer drank some liquor at the Marine Plaza Hotel on Mumbai’s Marine Drive, and then decided to drive home to Chembur in the city’s eastern suburbs. Only, she decided to drive on the wrong side of the Eastern Freeway. She ran into a taxi, killing two people in it and injuring four others. (Her Audi’s airbags deployed, saving her life).
Pereira’s seven, and Gadkar’s two: nine more who have given their lives to contribute to this sobering, dispiriting statistic – every four minutes on our roads, day in and day out, we kill another fellow-Indian.
'I was drunk'
We have laws against drunk driving, as we all know well. Gadkar knew it too, even while drunk. For she apparently sat in her car on Marine Drive for two hours, waiting for the intoxication to wear off. Only then did she set out for home. But of course it hadn’t worn off. In her statement to the police, she actually said, “As I was drunk, I was not able to understand the road.”
These tragedies set off so many trains of thought that it’s hard to follow them all coherently. But let’s see:
*Certainly drinking impairs your judgement, so asking why Gadkar decided to drive at all that night may be a futile question. She thought, in her befuddled state, that she was capable of driving home. That’s all.
But here’s the infuriating and tragic conundrum. At least to start with, she actually knew she wasn’t capable. This is why she waited two hours. If she could think clearly enough to wait, why didn’t she think it through a little more and spend the night somewhere in town, perhaps even at the hotel? Why not park the Audi somewhere and take a taxi home? Why did the friends she was with not offer to either have her stay with them or drive her home? (What kind of friends are these who would leave Gadkar to drive home inebriated?)
*Did Gadkar and Pereira think drunk-driving laws – whether letter or spirit – did not apply to them? What other explanation is there for their flouting the fundamental idea of such laws: if I drink, whatever the amount, I must not drive, period? (A specified level of intoxication is really just gravy). What gives people like these notions like these?
*After Pereira’s crime, various people sought to defend him on various grounds, each more specious than the other. One of these was an Anjum Samel. He wrote a letter to the press suggesting that the real criminals were the people Pereira ran over. The city, he wrote, “has become one big orphanage and the migrants keep pouring in”. He wanted the Motor Accidents Tribunal to “take cognisance of whether the victims have transgressed the law” by sleeping on pavements. If so, they had to be punished. (What punishment he had in mind, meaning beyond Pereira killing them, he didn’t specify).
So far at least, there’s no similar attempt to deflect the blame in Gadkar’s case onto her victims. But Samel’s theorising is familiar indeed. It also serves to deliberately muddy the issue. After all, even if they should not have been sleeping there, Pereira broke the law by driving drunk, and then broke it again by killing those seven people. Period.
*Unsaid but implied in Samel’s theorising is something else that is familiar: the laws of the land are really for someone else, not for me. Thus: There should be laws against drinking and driving, but I’ll drive drunk when I want. There should be municipal rules to get people to scoop up their dogs’ poop, but no way am I going to do it myself. Others must obey traffic signs, but I’ll drive the wrong way on a one-way street when it’s convenient for me.
How many of us have confronted wrong-way drivers, only to have them offer this face-palmer: “But I live here!” What’s there to say, really?
Finally: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Swachh Bharat” campaign has run into plenty of scepticism because it doesn’t seek to address fundamentally wrong-headed attitudes towards cleanliness and littering. (Like: “I can drop my garbage in this public spot, because cleaning it up isn’t my problem but someone else’s.”) Until those change, you know this will remain a dirty, polluted country.
In much the same way, there are plenty of fundamentally wrong-headed attitudes towards our laws of the road. (Like: “I will drive the wrong way on this street because my kid is late for school.”) Until those change, you know our roads will remain unsafe deathtraps.
Until every one of us acknowledges: If the laws are not for me, they are for nobody.