The bigger problem is people not traffic

A few weeks back, while I was on my way back from the office, I observed something interesting. It was around 9 PM in the night. As I drove past a turn and looked in the rear view mirror, an auto (rickshaw) turned on to that same turn. A girl followed on a scooter and didn’t see the auto turn and she had to hit the break hard to avoid collision. All of a sudden she started shouting at the rickshaw driver and started telling him a few traffic rules. She yelled how he took a turn without the indicators and didn’t even blow the horn before turning. The auto driver was not able to say anything at all as the girl was shouting and making him feel it was his mistake. As I was still driving, this was the only part which I was able to hear, but there was a lot to observe than just hear these monologues from the girl.

The other perspective

Until now it was just the incident and how it unfolded, but there is always a lot more in the actual picture if you observe. The girl was riding the scooter at a speed higher than the limit and didn’t see the auto was slowing down and was about to turn. The auto slowing down was a good enough sign that it was about to turn, though it’s easy to miss that detail if the indicators are not turned on. While I was recalling the speech from the girl about traffic rules and the mistakes of the auto driver, I realized that the girl was not wearing a helmet. If you scale the traffic rules for both side by side, I would think not wearing a helmet is a bigger offense than not turning on the indicators while turning on a road which was not very busy.

People know but yet they don’t

If the girl was riding a scooter and had a driving license, she must have passed the driving test, as she was aware that you need to turn on the indicators while turning. She should also have been aware that not wearing a helmet is not safe and she was also breaking traffic rules. So her justification or the reason to be angry because the auto driver didn’t follow the rules was not a very strong one. But why was that the first thing she communicated? As I see this, she was not angry at the auto driver, she just saw the auto driver as someone she could redirect her frustration to. That is something we do almost every day of our lives.

We need a weaker channel to push our frustration to

We usually, subconsciously, are looking for weaker channels around us to throw our frustrations at. At times they tend to be situations and we shout and cry and express our emotions which makes us feel light and take out all the frustration from us. But the problem is when that channel is not a situation or a thing but a person. We are able to get out of this frustration which was piling in from a week or so, but that person will be confused about what they did wrong. If it’s a close person they will understand, as they know you, but if it is someone else, things can be different.

If you think about it, it is not very difficult to be aware about the real reason of your frustrations and moods and find methods to phase them out. Just be observant about it and make sure that you are not channeling your frustration towards a weak channel, but instead you are consciously throwing them out in right ways. It’s easy to get angry or frustrated at the wrong people in wrong situations, but doing the difficult thing will make you a stronger and better person.