First Time Fined

    
I was caught over-speeding on the motorway and was fined a penalty of the equivalent of USD 70.

The penalty was not big but the impact it had on my ego was quite large.

This is the first time in my 17 years’ of car-driving I have paid a penalty. Must equally be true that it is possibly the first time I have broken the law. Or that is what i implicitly believe.

I may have paid many penalties in life – not all penalties for my mistakes you see – but this one has left me embarrassed. I foolishly tried to contest that I was driving fast but not faster enough to be punished but who can beat technology-the highway camera showed proof that i was speeding at a little over 100 when the limit was 80.

Talking of ego, the first driving lesson I had was in my brand new car in the early 90s. I couldn’t get down to the act of asking someone to loan his car for my driving experiments. (its a different matter that the driving school refused to allow me to drive anything other than its dual-brake car).  May be out of fear or that stupid morality, the first resolution I made was never ever to break any traffic rules. To me amber was red if i had to stop and amber was never green if i had to move.  Would take pride in stopping at red signals even at midnight and when alone. Speed limit was obeyed always furiously but when there were no obstructions, i would go crazy behind the wheels. That pride of being a virgin-lawbreaker is lost

But later in my years  I realized I can’t be too rigid about rules as i couldn’t always have someone to drive me when inebriated. So that may always remain the reprieves I have had in the eyes of traffic law. We often build around us strong walls of morality initially and then build weak bridges of ways to circumvent and beat them. We live by examples we come across presumably.

Brings to the fore the karma theory behind mistakes and penalties.