Driving in Bangalore is an art that requires great skill and lots of preparation. There are basically three things that you need: (1) good brakes (2) A good, loud, screeching horn and (3) Good luck. You need (3) in especially large quantities, but if your good luck is particularly bad, don’t worry, I have some tips for you to make your driving experience in Bangalore a particularly pleasurable one. There are 3 phases to driving: Preparation, Driving and Inspection.

Preparation
Driving in Bangalore is the closest that you’ll get to a ZEN experience. In fact, it has been rumoured that ZEN masters of the old times are re-incarnated as cows and buffaloes and now live on the roads of Bangalore for this very reason. Before you can get into the ZEN state, you’ll need to make the following preparations:

Make sure that you have a list of expletives and swear words taped to your dashboard - They can be used in cases of emergencies - i.e., when no good swear word comes to your mind when you’re in the middle of a street argument. Also, make sure that you know how to use each of those words properly in a sentence. In fact, practice it right now on all the people around you.

The next step is the car inspection and preparation. Make sure that the side mirrors are opened. Side mirrors can be used as weapons to attack pedestrians that venture too close to your vehicle. Bonus points if you hit a pedestrian with the side mirror, and the mirror neatly folds inside. The pedestrian will then get confused as to what hit him, because it certainly wasn’t your mirror, since it’s folded inside.

Another thing to make sure is to see that all the stickers on the side and back of the car are intact. You need to have stickers like ‘GReddy’, ‘Ultimate Racing’, ‘NOX’ and ‘Ferrari’ pasted on the side and back of the car. Having these stickers gives you super powers - like the ability to ignore common sense and drive recklessly - that are very powerful and undoubtedly useful.

Driving
Once you are sitting behind the wheel, you have to approach driving like a video game - The goal is not to get to your destination safely, but to see how many people you can overtake on the roads. You get 10 points for every car you overtake, 20 for every 2-wheeler and auto rickshaw, and 50 points for every bus and truck. Bonus points if you continuously honk while overtaking.

I can already hear the skeptics asking “What is the point of overtaking if you are just going to reach the next signal and wait there anyway?”. Good question, I say, but logic and reason have no place in the art of driving. It’s like asking “Why does Rakhi Sawant wear short clothes?”. To ask such a question is to miss the point entirely.

Sooner or later, you are going to hit other vehicles, pedestrians and/or cows while you are driving. When this happens, you have to use the vocabulary that you have taped to your dashboard. You get extra combo points if you stop your car in the middle of the road and argue. Also, style points for use of multiple expletives in the same sentence.

But there is a caveat here. Make sure your list of expletives is up-to-date. There’s nothing embarrassing as using an out-dated or out-of-fashion swear word. For example, it used to be fashionable to use the word “Hajam” on Bangalore’s roads a while ago, but not anymore. As a side note, ‘hajam’ means ‘barber’ in the native tongue, which makes you wonder where these so-called explicitves come from. I have a very interesting theory about this, but I’ll save that for some other time. Anyway, the standard rule is to fight the verbal duel for about 15 minutes, and then continue on your journey. Of course, arguing with strangers on the street is absolutely pointless because it doesn’t reverse the damage caused by the impact, but this argument is going into the domain of logic and reason - something we don’t like.

Inspection
Once you have successfully completed your journey and arrived at your destination, it is time to do the post-drive inspection. Make sure all the tyres are still on, because pedestrians and sometimes cows have the habit of stealing these when you are engrossed in arguing with strangers. Also check to see if all your passengers have arrived with you - They have a tendency to get lost. And last, but not the least, inspect your rear and front bumpers to see if there are any cats/street dogs/pedestrians you might have accidentally dragged with you. If there are, place them outside on the road again, so they may catch the next bumper to their destination.

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