Pakistanis Should Start Installing Dashcams In Their Cars

Karachi winters make a fool of everybody. We don’t get to wear the fanciest of jackets and still wear them flip flops all around. But before the last gust of Quetta winds leave Karachi, we were heading out for Coffee and on the way out witnessed some plain ‘Sons of Anarchy’ stuff on the road.

There are Shehzore fitted with water tanks…these medium-sized water delivery solutions are used for supply to apartments where Karachi Water Board is unable to supply water partly because of their incompetence, and partly because of Karachi Building Control Authority’s (KBCA) greed to rather check the money delivered under the table to approve a certain building, and so, water supply or roads aren’t big enough to actually cater the hundreds that will flock to live there alongside massive malls with no parking solutions. It all adds to the chaos we become a part of on daily basis.

With no modifications to the suspension, the brakes or any other form of modification for these overweight Shehzore’s or China trucks have, it is quite a skill to emergency brake in these things.

So it’s night, few street lights are shut, the few that are open dimly light up the streets and on the main road of Gulistan-e-Johar, coming down from a bridge, two guys on a bike decided that they have to stop there and then in the middle lane without looking or understanding what’s behind them and they stopped because they spotted something or someone. The Shehzore driver was a good one, he was easily at about 50 KM/H and with the load the truck was carrying, no way it was going to stop so he dabbed the brakes hard and we saw the Shehzore move like a see-saw on a wedge and the vehicle just brushed the shoulder of the riders literally.

I could see the anger and fury in the eyes of the bikers, they seemed as if they were on the right and because Pakistanis tend to choose their enemy on the roads quite carefully, and its usually the weaker one, I wonder what came out of it as we had moved on because we couldn’t have stopped right there in the fast lane.

It is a lot of times that the innocent is paying the price of an accident. Regardless of how the person brakes in front, they all know the rule that the one who hit from the back is at fault. But given our traffic, a lot of times the person who hit from the back isn’t at fault.

Then there are the pedestrians, its the freedom of thought that they’ll zig-zag through the hordes of chaos that we call our traffic and there are ridiculously close calls while crossing the road but given the average speeds on our roads is no more than just 40 km/hs unfortunately, everyone gets home in a single piece but with a distraught sense of humor, madness, and hunger.

It is established that their are a lot of Choudaries on our roads, and with how the justice mob is ready to flock to a scene of incident and become the jury and the executioner without any evidence at all, dash-cams can work as a proper tool that can present the picture of what actually happened right there and then. Dash-cams also help you find out how mechanics treat your cars when you leave them for maintenance at your local auto shops.

In Russia, where these dashcams got the most popularity from, the Russians use the footage of dash-cams to be presented in the court so the rightful offender can be charged and punished.

Thing is, the land of the pure is ironically very prone to theft. You just can’t leave a valuable item exposed in your car especially Mehran and Cultus whose rear quarter panel can come off like a bottle’s lid. But you don’t need HD footage, even if you did and you got yourself a GoPro for this purpose, you can easily conceal it in the tissue box.

If you got yourself a smaller camera, like the small backview camera, there are plenty of places to conceal them in the car and when someone brings your hopes and dreams in a huge bang, just get out, tell them I have the full evidence on tape which can help a lot even if you get shot up at the sight of the incident, you can have the law behind your back. Regardless of how lazy the law comes in to effect but its the only way to change our Choudary like behavior on the road.