I was driving my dad’s i10 on a very narrow road in Himachal. There’s no divider on that road, and there’s no extra space on the left or right, there’s just trees, with traffic going both ways. It’s a straight road, with no elevation changes, you can see pretty far ahead. Even though the road is narrow, it’s still a highway, so you’re going a good 50-60 kph.
You know what, this is important, so here’s a badly drawn MS Paint representation. The green stars are the trees, naturally, and I’ve even added a car and a truck to show just how narrow the road is, and because I like you.
There was a good amount of traffic on this road that day, cars and trucks and buses on both lanes almost bumper to bumper, but still moving fairly quickly. I was going with the flow of the traffic, nothing out of the ordinary, just a normal day of driving in Himachal.
Suddenly I see a BMW 1200 GS coming from the opposite lane. He is overtaking everyone and everything, weaving in and out of the lanes. This is your standard 1200 GS midlife-crisis edition, with those massive pannier and tail racks, giant smoked windscreen, fat crash bars up front, and a whole bunch of multi-colored auxiliary lights mounted on the bars.
As a biker, I have a soft spot for other bikes, seeing someone decked out in gear on a motorcycle gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. Here however that warm fuzzy feeling did not exist for too long, because the dickhead on the GS did one of the most idiotic things that Indian road users do, he flashed his high beams at me.
Let me repeat that, this guy on a motorcycle which is about as wide as my shitty i10, on an extremely narrow road with no space to move, in heavy traffic, flashed his headlights at me while he was in the wrong lane directly in front of me. To this day I don’t understand what he expected would happen, did he think I would go “oh, alright”, swing my steering to the left, and yeet myself into the tress just to let his majesty make his stupid overtake?
Of course I didn’t move, or slow down, or do anything at all. He moved back into his lane and aborted his overtake. But why the fuck did he do it? Did he actually think that just because he spent more on aux lights than my car is worth, it gives the photons coming out of them some magical properties? Rich people do understand that money can’t change the laws of physics right? Your headlight, no matter how bright, cannot physically move me.
Another similar incident happened a few weeks later, this time on a 4 lane highway with a divider. I was in the right lane, in the i10 again. This was at night, and I was again going with the flow of traffic, not too fast and not too slow. Suddenly there’s this repeated blinding flash of light from behind me, it’s that white LED light that’s very popular nowadays. There’s no honking, which I guess I should be thankful for, but this epilepsy inducing high beam-low beam-high beam cycle, which I don’t understand the purpose of.
If he wanted me to move over into the left lane, he probably should’ve noticed the trucks and the cars and people parked there at random intervals. Did he just want to get my attention, get me to appreciate how bright the headlights on his piece of shit Baleno are? I don’t know, so I didn’t do anything again. He overtook me from the left after a while.
What’s frustrating about this the most is that everywhere else in the world that I have lived, flashing your lights at someone is a sign of politeness, that you’re giving them the way. In Scotland when I was driving a rental car on a very narrow forest road, oncoming drivers would often park their cars on the left and flash their headlights to tell me to go through. In Germany if you’re in traffic and you see someone trying to merge in front, you slow down and flash your high beams to let them through into your lane.
It is so hilariously Indian that we have taken this signal of politeness and converted it into a symbol of bullying. “Do you know who I am? I am more important so I will go first”. The hilarious part is that it is nothing but bluff, there’s no fucking rule that says I have to move just because you flashed your lights at me, I don’t give a shit. It may make you feel slightly better about the size of your dick, but it has absolutely no effect on my driving.
I am following the rules of the road and driving like a normal person should, until your headlights can shoot actual high powered lasers that’ll make my car explode, I am going to ignore your illiterate little sorry ass and move on with my life.