Rash driving: Is it a MH12 Syndrome??

As resident of Pune, I am subjected to Pune traffic everyday, even if I chose to travel by office bus to commute from home to office. But still by the end of the day I feel exhausted due to the traffic snarls of the city. After getting bored whole year without any significant outing, we decided to ride out to Amboli at least on the last weekend of the year. OK, I’ll post that ride story later, but let me complete this first… ;-)

While returning to Pune on last day of trip, we started early from Ajra, yepp that’s where we had stayed during this ride. We reached the Shippur turn pretty fast and nice by 8:40am and had our customary breakfast. When we started for Pune from there, we reached the main NH-4 and one big burly Innova coming from B’lore side cut into my lane while taking over a truck. I was shocked and braked the bike hard as it was down-hill, but I was angry when the number-plate of that rash vehicle read MH12-FP####. Immediately I got the point, this is some jack-ass from the town I live.

We continued at our pace and the bikes munched the miles rigourously without much ado. There was not much traffic on the road and everything was pretty smooth. The climate was fantastic and pleasant. By the time we touched Kolhapur, traffic started to increase. Many people were crowding the NH for their daily commute and poor trucks were finding it hard to navigate through all that local rubble. The simplest solution they have found out was keeping in the right lane and keeping left free for all the small and sundry. We all were crawling at slow speeds below 50kmph and suddenly one white Ford Fiesta came honking from right and got into the traffic on left lane with utmost brazenness. I was fast enough to spot its number plate, which read MH12-EX####.

After Kolhapur, till Satara, things were peaceful once again, but the temperature has started to rise slowly and we were taking ample breaks. We had expected the traffic to grow and continue to be dense throughout till Pune. Again, there will be pouring traffic from Mahabaleshwar turn. So we decided to keep the breaks to minimum and keep riding for longer distances. We encountered 2 more rash drivers, blue Getz (MH12-DY####) and again blue Baleno (MH12-CR####).
During overall 370kms of ride on that day, out of which 300kms was on the NH, we encountered 4 rash drivers all belonging to Pune. This made me think about whats wrong with this place? Why the people who travel here are so harsh on others and don’t bother to think about others on the road?