When 26-year-old Anubhav Rao, a Delhi-bred fighter pilot, got knifed to death by a lawyer in Himachal Pradesh last week, he became the latest to be slain on the rough roads of north India. As road rage reared its ugly head again, it wasn’t without making heads stand up, questioning the character of its perpetrators. “How could a lawyer kill?” was a common refrain among experts. “What world are we living in?” wondered others.

There was a time when road rage was associated with sudden bouts of anger. These days, it translates into brutal acts of killing. On April 10, four men on two vehicles shot dead Sheeba Thomas, an ex-airhostess with Virgin Airlines. She was returning home in her Hyundai Accent car after attending a party. Though it is not very clear if the incident was an outcome of road rage, the indications are all there. At some point of time, the four assailants halted their vehicles in front of her car. An angry Thomas opened the door of her car. One of the assailants then dragged her out and started beating her. As she was not easily overpowered, one of the four men opened fire from a pistol and the bullet passed through her chest.

In July last year, Jitender Pawar, a 35-year-old property dealer in Delhi, was bludgeoned to death by bikers after he protested when they brushed past his car. The group killed him by repeatedly hitting him with a rod and helmets.

If statistics are anything to go by, New Delhi seems in a mad rage to create new road rage benchmarks. It clocked a record 11 cases of road rage in just the first two months of 2008. If Delhi traffic officials are to be believed, road rage crimes hit that figure in “roughly four months”. It even prompted minister of state for home affairs Radhika V. Selvi to set off alarm bells at the Rajya Sabha in February, calling for immediate steps to check the spurt.

But all these horrors beg a vital question. It’s one thing for people to get into a tiff after an accident of any magnitude. But it’s quite another for them to get murderous. How come even at the hint of an accident, drivers’ tempers shoot up enough to even want to kill someone? Is the killer a man — or a woman — like you or me? Or is there a killer in all of us?

“A road rage criminal is a ticking bomb, and the road is the site of conflict. Most drivers are extremely stressed-out individuals. And we’re living in a society desensitised to conflict,” says psychiatrist Samir Parikh, of Max Health Care, Delhi. “In cities such as Delhi, travelling as an experience is subconsciously associated with conflict, because travelling is a nightmare.”

Parikh routinely comes across patients and couples who have to drive long distances to work. And the road rage criminal, he says, might just be one of them. “That’s the horror of it. You or I can become people who suddenly kill. But that’s not the motivation. Basically, many road rage perpetrators want to thwart violence. In an attempt at self-defence they keep arms. But when the situation explodes there’s no fear or consequence factor to deter them either.”

A senior Delhi traffic police official who doesn’t want to be named concedes that “there is little fear or respect for the law” as far as road rage criminals go. “If individuals want to willingly fight, what can we do,” he complains. But with the matter being brought up in the Rajya Sabha, Delhi traffic officials have “cracked the whip,” he says. Some innovative measures have been introduced to counter the developments.

Taking a leaf out of measures taken up by the Bangalore Police, Delhi traffic police will soon start spreading awareness about how to counter road rage-related situations. In February this year, Bangalore Police took the help of Krav Maga, a quasi-military Israeli organisation that aids drivers and traffic police in self-defence methods when road rage spills into violence. An Israeli team, police sources say, is expected in Delhi to put a similar plan into place.

“The most important thing is to not lose your cool. If you’ve done something wrong, apologise. No harm in saying sorry. Both the involved drivers and others in the vehicles must try to defuse the heat,” says S.N. Shrivastava, Delhi’s joint commissioner of police, in charge of traffic. “The others in the vehicle are equally responsible in calming frayed nerves, not just the drivers. The general public must step up to help.”

At the same time, Shrivastava feels issues like the vehicular pressure on roads is “getting too much” and the infrastructure is trying desperately to cope up. “Choked roads — as much as speeding and accidents — are causes of road rage,” he says.

For Anand Kumar, a sociologist at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, the mayhem is a consequence of social disintegration. “Value systems have collapsed and with it have values like tolerance. No more do you find trifling kindnesses like younger people giving up seats for the very old on crowded buses. Your road rage criminal is a man whose sense of right and wrong is already negligible. And it vanishes when he is under pressure.”

Some believe that the violent road-rager is a man who sees himself as the one in power. “For people living in metropolitan cities such as Delhi, possessions like a car or jazzy bike embody a vague notion of power. They feel because they’re driving a particular car or a bike, they are empowered. When the authority that comes with it gets questioned, as in when there’s an accident, they feel their self esteem is questioned and ego hurt. So they hit back,” explains sociologist Dipankar Gupta. “His violence originates from a skewed notion of power. And it’s a telling indication of insecurity, intolerance and lack of overall individual growth. It’s a systemic failure.”

But there is hope yet. Parikh has experience dealing with such patients. He illustrates how a couple came along and the wife complained about her spouse’s dramatic behaviour change while driving from Noida, a Delhi suburb, to work in south Delhi.

“A normally even-tempered person would get aggressive and abusive and yell at others on the road and his wife. Once he was about to hit a very old man. The wife then got her husband along to me,” says Parikh. The psychiatrist reasoned it out with the patient. “From a constant third and fourth gear sort of a driver, he started driving more slowly. I told him to think of driving as a pleasure. Take slow rides around your park.” It worked. The man enjoys his drives now. “There’s always hope for people to change for the better,” says Parikh.

His dashboard, incidentally is now adorned with a little image of a god. The hockey stick in the man’s dickey has vanished. So has the pen knife from his pocket.