A common piece of advice in life is: "Be careful, drive safely." It's true for me, too. I have always been a very careful driver, but what if other people aren't? It doesn't matter how carefully you drive because some careless drivers put you in dangerous situations anyhow. This is what happened to me.
             I had graduated from college in 1989 and was heading back home. My home was in a village in southern India. I had several friends. Most of them were my age, mainly my school buddies. Every evening we would gather together on our school's playground and talk about so many things. Some of us would sing, tell stories or play soccer. We had a joyful time.
             Most of us had motorcycles to ride around on. Whenever we had time, we would just roam around our village. That was our main job in life at the time. One of my friends was Mathew, who had an automobile spare-parts shop in our village. He got spare-parts from a nearby town. He had to go to the town twice a month to purchase them. On his next trip to town, he asked me to accompany him.
             It was a Saturday that we planned to go to town to purchase spare-parts for his shop. Early that morning Mathew had come to my house to pick me up; we had some breakfast together and left the house about 8'o clock. We were both riding on my motorcycle. While we were leaving, my mom was in the front yard; she told us to be careful and drive safely. I told her, "Don't worry, Mom, my eyes will be on the road."
            
             The roads in India are mostly tarred and very narrow with two-way traffic. The roads aren't straight at all with several hairpin turns. Driving on those narrow roads was very difficult, especially if you are driving a motorcycle. There were a lot of arrogant pedestrians and bicycle riders who thought that t...