Well, today being the trek, I was returning home earlier than usual from office. Well on the way, just as I took a turn, a signal changed to red. So I had to stop in a hurry and just missed the stop line but I still stopped. Another guy had ideas to the contrary and without bothering about the red light, continued on.
Unfortunately for him, just a little past the signal, a few traffic cops were waiting to conduct surprise checks and hence stopped him. At first he refused to move to the side and wanted to continue on but finally relented. He spoke something with the cops and after a minute, the cops signalled for me to go to them. At first I thought it might be to check us and question us as well since I had crossed the stop line as well.
But the politeness with which he called, I thought otherwise and realised he wanted to ask me something about the stopping. So I go to him and he very politely asks me if I understood Kannada, which is the local language here (I don’t look much like a bangalorean I guess 
) and when I replied to the affirmative, asked me who had reached the signal first. I replied it was me and that the other guy had overtaken me. After that he asked me if I had stopped while the light was green or while it was red. Apparantely the other guy had lied to the cop stating that I’d stopped for some other reason and not a red light. At first I thought what to answer and then decided to stick with the truth(I hate lying anyway). I clearly told the cop that I had stopped cos the signal had switched to red. The other man vociferously said it was not so. I calmly and without any apprehension replied it had turned red. At this the cop believed me and permitted to leave. I expect the other guy must have been fined.
Anyway, so the point of the story is, following rules does pay off, most of the times even though I’ve been contradicted about that quite a few times. I try and always follow traffic rules. And I was proud I did that today even though I was in a hurry 
Tags: contrary, guess, hurry, kannada, local_language, politeness, realised, red_light, refused, rules, surprise_checks, traffic_cops, Traffic_signal, unfortunately
March 25th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Even I wish more drivers would follow the rules. It’s tempting to break rules because Bangalore traffic is painful, but the benefit of jumping a signal is not much anyway. Or the police might catch you, like it happened here. Police calling witnesses to testify on the road is funny, though
You type all those tags for each post or you have some software to do that?
March 27th, 2006 at 10:16 am
u luv tags dont u
March 27th, 2006 at 6:07 pm
Yeah.. The traffic situation in Bangalore has only gone from bad to worse
But I irrespective of the others, I try to follow the rules..
For the tags, it’s a plugin to allow tagging and associating them with the post and linking them to technorati,
@Ankur: Not quite love but I like them cos they allow better organisation and are not as rigid as the categories system.. Though I’m planning to turn of displaying them in the post page and make a seperate page to show a tag cloud for searching..
March 27th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
Dude great work sticking to the story… Bangalore traffic is truly a pain and Im happy music in my ears tends to get me away from the stress that is bangalore roads…
PS: Dude this is why I hide my tags
March 27th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
That is one thing I’m not sure about as well.. The music while riding. To me it’s akin to talking on the handsfree of a cell-phone which is illegal. So listening to personal music players must be illegal as well. But I’m not sure about it so I cannot say anything concrete on it.
Yeah dude I understood it that day when I saw the no. of tags you put in
This post for some reason generated a lot of tags. I don’t think I put in any tags of my own! But yes, it does make it a little too over-populated
March 28th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
ha .. btw no offence meant … i dont know why i just thought i’ll write
March 29th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
None taken as well
It was looking a bit cluttered