Near miss

I'm fairly sure that quite a few incidents like this one happen every day on the roads of Chennai. Traffic being what it is, it is a rare vehicle that does not have the marks of Chennai road-life. As for close shaves, there is no point even thinking about them, because they are too numerous to count. The 2-wheelers snake across the road, even making right-angled turns to get to that patch of tarmac on the lane across, so as to get ahead by those couple of millimetres. The autos believe if their front wheel can get into a space, the rest of vehicle can, too. The buses are by and large immune to prosecution and often throw their considerable weight behind flouting the rules. And then those vehicles ferrying BPO employees, with the threat of penalties for latecoming hanging over their heads, trying to save time all the time.

But you'd expect the off-peak hours traffic to be saner. And it is, usually. But the lighter traffic also lets the regular drivers relax - and that's what seemed to have happened to this bus driver, too. He was moving too slowly to be real and the van thought it a good idea to cut ahead - it was lucky that the bus driver woke up in time - the 'Hhwooornunk' of his brakes got everyone to turn around - including the two bikes in front, who then demonstrated their interpretation of Brownian motion before speeding away!