5 seconds of inconvenience = road rage: Car driver damages my bike

Now I just want to shut up and never ever engage with anyone for anything regardless of what's happening.

BHPian Yieldway17 recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

I recently was in a road rage incident and the incident has been bothering me since then so I wanted to pen it down here.

I was on my two-wheeler coming back from work at around 10:30 pm when the roads are generally busy but not crowded. I was getting down from a flyover ramp to join a major road and hence was keeping to the right lane as the left lane lands before shops where people park their cars and bikes.

As the traffic was minimal, I was doing 45-50kmph and had my right indicator on to merge into the major road below. Note that the flyover has a 30 km/h speed limit and it was slightly drizzling.

As I was almost at the merge point seeing to my right for vehicles on the major road, I noticed a very fast car approaching down from the flyover ramp on my mirrors. They were soon on my back as the flyover ramp wall ended, and as I was about to merge to the 2nd left-most lane of the road below, the car started blaring its horn so much that I had to abandon my merge for my safety and move left to the lane near to the parked vehicles to let them go ahead on my right.

At the same time, he tried to overtake me on the left in the narrow gap which with me moving left as well, he had to abandon again. I do agree that for a fast-moving car, a two-wheeler not being decisive on the front can be irritating as I had been there in the driver's seat. But that indecision is being created by the driver themselves here instead of letting me who is in the front to merge in 2 seconds.

Here is where I also made a mistake. I got irritated by them so much that I turned back and asked why with my hand. Now this had incensed them so much that they overtook me and stopped the car blocking me.

Two guys immediately jumped out of the car and started abusing me. One of them who was not the driver was extremely angry and said he could kill me right there and hit one of my side mirrors with such force that it fell off (it was slightly shaky before). They kept asking why I moved left when I had my right indicator on. I replied to them that their being on so much speed and blaring their horn made me abandon my right move. The guy who hit the mirror just wanted to hit me and the other guy was somewhat reasonable blocking him.

I got down, picked up my mirror, put it in my bag and just started leaving which they didn't want me to do and wanted me to park to the side and fight with them. I just left finding a gap thinking just about getting safe to home instead of engaging with these idiots and engaging in a brawl and getting beaten up.

This had been in my mind since then and been repeatedly thinking about how I could have avoided it and also why some of the people are loaded with powder kegs just waiting for a spark to blow up. All this rage over basically an inconvenience of 5 seconds max and them not following any rules of the road.

I'm kind of an active person on the road who is somewhat assertive and do ask the other drivers or riders why they are doing what they are doing when they do stupid things on the road. Now I just want to shut up and never ever engage with anyone for anything regardless of what's happening. I'm just posting this here as a form of venting and ruminating as the incident has been stuck in my head and just want to clear it out.

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