aditya kumar's weblog

The kind of an evening when a car hits your car and runs away and you can’t do a thing.

So we were at HSR Layout. At Parangipalaya to be precise. There, the road goes thin. It is a single lane, if you can call it that, with lots of pedestrians and a hawker market on both sides. There are a couple of temples at one end of the road. Mostly, there is chaos there. OK, a different kind of chaos. Parangipalya is an area with mostly a high density of everything – people, traffic and everything else.

I don’t really know why I chose to take that road. I think it had something to do with where I was headed to. I was headed towards a neighbourhood which has an approach road similar to Parangipalya’s. I think that was what I thought – you avoid one, you hit another one of those anyway. And who’s to say that the main road had less traffic? All in all it did not demand that much thinking — to put things in perspective, this was merely 500 metre in length.

So anyway – as we were in the middle of this road, a black Ford Ikon came to my right, from behind. The man behind the wheel was fast, I barely saw him in the rear view mirror. He zipped by my A-Star (which was not more than 20-25 Kmph), and then as he overtook my car, from the wrong lane, he perhaps saw the traffic coming from the other side. In a hurry to come back to the right lane (in order to avoid a front-on collision) his car’s behind hit my car’s right edge of the front bumper and the body. Our car shook. The whole thing lasted less than 10 seconds.

The next moment I saw this car slowing down and moving towards the left side. My first thought was that he seemed to be slowing down. I then realized that it took a little time for him to register that he had hit a car (from the behind) and then I saw him speeding up. I went on a chase, trying to confront him. Meanwhile, my wife was pleading me to stop and trying to talk some sense. I sped up, drove rash and I could later hear my wife screaming and the baby panicky. I went on a chase, for the next 5 minutes or so, with this car in front of me all the while. I realized we were going around the same roads. Finally, sanity prevailed and I stopped my car on the side. I examined the damage done and eventually drove towards our planned destination.

In hindsight, it was a stupid thing to do from my part, I completely get that. I have never really been in a similar situation before and I did not know how to react. I snapped. But the fact that I drove rash, putting all our lives, those of my family and those outside, in danger (small or big risk – I do not know, it does not matter) was inexplicable.

I thought about it a lot and the thing that I am still wondering is this: What would I have done, had I finally nabbed this guy? I certainly did not want any money. I think what angered me more than the fact that he hit my car was that he ran away after hitting us. Maybe all I wanted was for him to accept that he was wrong and say sorry and move on.

But seeking that, I went to another extreme, which, without a doubt, was not justified at all.

ps: I am trying to come back to blogging so if you’re reading this, drop in a comment. I’d love to know if people still read blogs!