22

Sep

Book Review: Being Positive  Amidst Chaos Of Traffic Jam  

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7 years on the Road
Author      -  Shailesh Sinha     
Publisher  -  Bat Shala
Price         -  Rs 349


Amitabh Srivastava 

New Delhi | Tuesday | September 22, 2026

The ABC of T (Traffic)
Did you know that an average human being spends 3 out of 24 hours of the day commuting  which totals up to 7 years of a human's life if he lives up to 80, says Shailesh Sinha.
And we have to trust him because his second name is Traffic Guru of India.
It's not an easy title to wear in a country where more than 2 lakh lives are lost every year to road accidents. Having been witness to the chaos on the roads in huge cosmopolitan cities as well as the smaller towns in the most populous country of the world, it's so easy and tempting to turn pessimistic like journalists do.
Or find alibis-can’t change the mindset of Indian road users, the police are corrupt, there are too many vehicles being added every year, roads are in bad shape and of course the increasing incidents of road rage etc etc.
The beauty of this book by Shailesh Sinha, who has spent 25 years mastering this chaos is that it stays totally positive.
It motivates its readers to understand the consequences of their rash or careless actions through personal anecdotes and fasten their seat belts, as they announce in the aeroplanes.
His passion to understand this chaos came quite early in life when as a child he had asked his father, who was a busy doctor, why did Red mean Stop and Green mean Go on traffic signals.
Probably he never got that answer till now.
But as he grew up from school to college and beyond, this passion with traffic signals and everything else about traffic took possession of him.
It was those personal experiences that stayed with him and haunted him like ghosts all his life to make him what he is-Traffic Guru of India.
As he writes eloquently,”In the 1980s, we didn't have  24 hour news channels screaming about accidents. Television was still a luxury, radio was king, but my real education came from living it, breathing it, watching the chaos of Delhi's streets day after day.”
And he could have added, news of accidents meant the last para of the Crime Bulletin issued by the Delhi Police to daily newspapers.
The first rude confrontation with reality came with a news not from Delhi but from Lucknow. It was a phone call informing them about the death of his favourite aunt Kumud and her husband.
“Just like that, two young lives snuffed out,two families plunged into darkness that would never fully lift.”
He was in school then, travelling on DTC buses to play cricket from his home in Rohtak Road to Ferozshah Kotla. After that Shailesh played cricket at the national level with legends like Akash Chopra, Virendra Sehwag, Deepdas Gupta and Gautam Gambhir.
But he did not make cricket his career. It was meant for much more than that. Once he joined Hansraj College of Delhi his cricket got him more friends, one of them being the 18 year old Kesavan Srivatsan, a leg spinner.
But this friendship did not last long. Kesavan met with an accident while riding his scooter.
Shailesh writes,"I have lived with that loss for nearly 30 years now and the pain hasn't dulled even a little.”
It's not that all of us have not seen or heard about accidents in our life.
The difference is that he always sees the larger picture.
He is haunted by the impact such accidents have on relationships, on parents,on children, on family, hence this obsession with making roads safer, saving lives.
And I quote, “That’s the real tragedy of road accidents- it's never just one death. It's the slow death of everyone left behind, the way grief spreads like poison through entire families, communities and generations.
But surprisingly this feeling did not break him. It only firmed his resolve to do something concrete, tangible and possible to suggest measures so that these tragedies are minimised.
The rest is history, as they say.
True, most of us don't get the chance to truly get a chance to fulfil our ambitions.
Shailesh was lucky, thankfully, for all of us.
As he rushed with a CV from one to another his father arranged a meeting with an influential mediaperson at Chanakyapuri that changed his future.
Having opened up about his obsession of making roads safer to prevent tragedies before a total stranger in sudden burst of energy, he was instantly directed to the All India Radio where with the support of Delhi Traffic Police he became a regular voice guiding people about the traffic impediments and alternative routes from 7 am to 11 in the morning and 5 to 10 pm everyday.
That was the beginning.
Technology changed and so did the horizons.
From Radio to Mobiles and later the Internet and finally the call from ‘India Today’ that made him into a national icon is a story that is spread across the 188 pages of this remarkable book published by Batshala.
Every chapter, every statistic,every instruction to drive safe is a fervent appeal from the heart to save lives.
The style is evocative and makes this book entirely unputdownable. This  is remarkable, because it's Shailesh Sinha's first book.

(The reviewer is a senior journalist)
 

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