Road Safety Week....

I have been driving around town like a taxi driver these past few days thanks to a family function that is coming up later this week. And each day on the road is interesting and by that I don’t mean just the madness of the traffic, but rather the sights that I have been observing….

For instance, today, I encountered a whole bunch of school kids on bicycles. They were all young teenage boys wearing T-shirts with ‘Road Safety Week’ in red. They were being ‘guided’ by a couple of men (teachers?) on bikes wearing similar clothes and carrying placards. I was driving in the same direction that they were riding and so could not quite see what was written on the placards that were placed in the front of each bicycle…but I gathered they were various messages, like ‘don’t drink and drive’, ‘obey traffic rules’, etc. I did manage to pull out my camera and shoot some pics at traffic signals.

But here’s what was happened….these kids were carrying these ‘be safe’ placards and weaving in and out of heavy traffic between cars and bikes and trucks and auto rickshaws like nobody’s business. They seemed to be in a hurry and were being instructed by the teachers to cut thru the traffic to gain speed. Just as I was thinking about how unsafe it actually was for them to proclaim safety in such a manner, one of the kids met with an accident. The boy was trying to squeeze thru a mo-bike and the curb/footpath and ended up in front of a moving auto and fell off his bicycle. The supposed ‘guide’ saw him falling and chose to drive on as though he were a total stranger and he knew nothing about the boy….

It’s bad enough that 13 and 14 year old kids have to ride thru such traffic to school and back…putting them thru such dangers in the name of safety, trusting that they are indeed being watched over by such teachers is outright stupidity!!

Road Safety indeed!!