Salaam from the people, yes people, whom you almost ran over, whom you shoved off the footpath, beeped to deafness and pushed from behind as they sat on rickshaws. The rickshaw-pullers would also like to wish you but they have been so bullied by you over the years that they suffer from a sense of motorised phobia.

Allow me to begin by stating that the country has nearly 21,000 km of road, and dear bikers, not one bit of that belongs to you alone, whatever amount for road tax, etc. you may be paying. However, your appalling road etiquette would belie that obvious fact. Although there are other users, you take the liberty to misbehave in connivance with your vehicle to a point that it appears that you two have the right to go right, left and forward, even backwards if needed.

While manoeuvring your two-wheelers, which you somehow are unable to do without continuously honking, you will nudge a pedestrian with your front wheel, graze a motorcar with your rear-view mirror, and arrogantly drive a rickshaw off its course, simply because you are in a hurry. It may help the rest of us if you understood that no one on the road is in less of a hurry than you.

The pavement, which you also mistakenly consider your road, definitely does not belong to you, and yet despite a court ruling, (if my memory is not failing me, footpaths were declared off-limits for your noisy and smoky contraptions), you honk big-headedly (not only on account of your helmet) to ply on it disdainfully and at will. Foot-travellers, children too, who normally have nowhere else to go, are traumatised by the revving of your engine and sickened by the grey smoke that emits from your pipe. It is they who have the right to walk on the pavement, and yet they are the ones who are thrown off, by you.

Judging by your reflection on road safety, at best you are rather selfish, wearing a helmet, and considering the head of your wife/friend/woh expendable. You care nought for the lady riding with you without a helmet. If only she knew she may not have hugged you as closely. Neither do you have any sense of responsibility for your kids: one stashed between you and the hand grip, another on your wife's lap, and yet another behind her. Ahem! But, you have a helmet on because the police will catch you. I have heard your equally disillusioned colleagues say that the police are okay with one rider wearing a hard hat. Aha! But that one protected person could have been your girlfriend, and yes I have seen that too; so much love for oneself, I refer to the privileged lady.

The wrong side of the road does not exist for you. In case you have not been in practice, we drive on the left side of a road since the first motor arrived in British India. Your philosophy is left-hand drive or right or even if there was a third hand, which perhaps is your prerogative, the bike must go on coupled with as much cacophony as your thumb can manage. Over footpaths and ditches, under barricades and over bridges, shoving people into roadside niches, all the traffic rules the biker breaches. How do you even sleep at night?

You make a habit of jumping the red light; that's the one above amber and green. I know it is not a usual practice for those who are warned "do not try this at home", but this refers to you speeding through with or without a companion or two on the pillion at the first half-an opportunity, while the traffic policeman is holding up the entire traffic.

You treat rickshaw-pullers like trash, as if they are parasites on the road. You address them derogatively with a 'tui'. Where from do you get such ideas of audacious behaviour? You literally command them as your slaves to pull their vehicle forward, or get down and push it back or to the sides to make the extra few inches so that Your Lordship may have his way through. 

Have you even considered that someday some rickshawalla may turn the tables on you? Them being in the majority, it might be a good idea to carry an additional helmet for two reasons: one for your passenger and the other to fend the keel-ghushi accompanying the wrath of the poor. No, I am not instigating a law and order situation because towards that end you (as motorcyclists) have been contributing for a long time. Plainly be reminded that the poor and the toiling cannot afford to readily counter an insult for various reasons, but whenever they did, they helped liberate a whole country.

The writer is a practising Architect at BashaBari Ltd., a Commonwealth Scholar and a Fellow, a Baden-Powell Fellow Scout Leader, and a Major Donor Rotarian.