Ask Aakar Anything: How do we deal with potholes on the road?

On my way from Delhi to Noida and back, I encounter many people (invariably male) driving bicycles, motorcycles and cars down the wrong side of the road. To what cultural trait do you ascribe this primitive, pathologically dangerous behaviour?
-Noor Qazi
The cultural trait, I would ascribe it to is being Hobbesian, which is the condition of thinking that the world is against you, and you are alone. I think that explains many things, not just our behaviour in traffic, it is not seen as society from which we develop benefit, but our own luck, our god, and our personal vertical relationship with God (as opposed to our horizontal relationship with our fellow man). So, we shouldn’t be surprised that we think of taking advantage where we can find it; everybody does this. But this is the way most of us are, and I think that this is not something that we can point to individuals and blame them for it. This is something in our culture — I think it comes to us mainly from our faith, which in my opinion, is Hobbesian. If your faith tells you that society is vertically ordered, that it is your personal relationship with God, and not your horizontal relationship with society that is most important, you’ll be selfish. I don’t think there is any getting around that.

Any idea how to deal with potholes on the road without causing any chaos or traffic during monsoons?
-Sterlin Fernandes ‏
No, I don’t. I must say this: that in my travels over the last 15-20 years, I must say that we are one of the very few countries with roads that are this poorly made. There are other countries that have really heavy rain, there are other countries that have very large populations, I know of almost no other country that has roads which are this dirty and which have roads that erode this quickly with the first rains. Perhaps the reason is that we don’t have the budgets to macadam or to make concrete the roads all the time, and we can only do patch work because that’s what our budgets allow for — I don’t know if that is the case, I haven’t studied it. But I must say this: that that there are nations almost as poor as we are, that do a much better job of their roads. Pakistan, which I’ve been to four or five times, has fabulous roads for the most part. We should be ashamed of the way we’ve treated our civic infrastructure. 

(This is an extract from Ask Aakar Anything, a weekly podcast. You can listen to the rest of the show here: www.audiomatic.in. DNA readers can send their questions for Aakar Patel to aaa@audiomatic.in with DNA in the subject line.)