I have an off-campus fresher recruitment drive in a short while from now. Since it is being held in the office closer to my home, I was driving along the ECR an hour ago.
Suddenly, near the "Fruit Shop" and "Dollar Store" area, a big cow started running on my side of the road. The Bolero in front of me was having a tough time in deciding whether to stop or swerve left and finally came to a halt. I too was observing the theatrics of the jumping cow and since the Bolero had come to a halt, I had to go a bit to my left to avoid hitting the van.
Just as I moved to the left side of the road, the cow fell on the road, some 15 feet in front of me. So I braked hard to avoid hitting the cow. Of course, by then I was moving at barely 10 Kph, so it wasn't a difficult task.
There was apparently a Safari also following me and when I braked, he rear-ended me. I was looking in my rear view mirror to see what hit me and saw the Safari. By then, the road users had started honking like mad wanting us to clear the road. I looked at the road ahead and didn't find the cow, only God knows where it went.
I started the car, lowered the window and pointed to the Safari guy to pull over along with me. He duly complied with my request. I got out of the car and inspected the rear of my Baleno. Thankfully, there was practically no damage. Probably the bumper had moved a little bit, but actually it isn't even worth mentioning.
The Safari was an AP registration and was filled with a very big family. By the time the driver (and I presume him to be the owner of the car) got down, I signalled to him that everything was fine and went back to my seat. He waved back to me apologetically.
Just as I started resuming my drive, he pulled up next to me and so I just waved to him once again that all's well. But he insisted that I pull down the window. I did and he too had pulled down his window. He then started telling me that since his car had ABS, he couldn't stop immediately and signalled a sorry once more. I waved back to him with a smile and we both went our separate ways.
But his statement got me thinking. To the best of my knowledge and as confirmed by Raghu, ABS is not going to impact how you brake under normal conditions like what happened this morning. In fact, according to this article stopping distances should only decrease. I only hope that he never has to make that statement under more serious circumstances and that too to a knowledgeable person.
But anyways, since there was no damage and since we weren't in an altercation, I decided to ignore the statement made by Mr.Manavaadu.
Now I am in my office, waiting for the interviews to begin!!!
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