The prevalent attitude seems to be that traffic rules are more like guidelines and can be broken if it seems "okay" to do so. Driving on the wrong side of the road is for example quite common, and most people do it to avoid making a long U-turn. Someone who I knew was driving a car and had a head on collision with a scooter travelling the wrong way on a highway, and the scooter had three passengers on board it (it's called "tripling" and is also pretty common). Sometimes you get to see cars reversing on highways with fast moving traffic, because they missed a turn and wanted to go back.
Things could probably get better in the future though. In New Delhi, for example - according to a new law, if you are caught in a traffic violation (such as ignoring a traffic signal), you lose your license along with the right to drive for three months. I saw somebody's status on Facebook that this happened to them, so it's not just an empty threat too.
If you switch sides, the traffic will aproach from your back, and that's a lot more dangerous.
Mind you, I'm not saying Indians are safe drivers. Indian driving, I freely admit, is spectacularly unsafe and makes me worried. There are a host of factors that cause this unsafe driving, including:
- Roads built for way smaller cars
- The sudden liberalization of the economy in the 90s leading to way more vehicles than the roads were designed for
- A lot of people owning a vehicle, and having social expectations from them about automatically knowing how to drive (I'm not kidding, and we're talking stick shift here)
- Traffic policemen numbers from the middle of the last century
- Mushrooming urbanization and the resultant low level of trust among urban populations
...but "some kind of mass insanity is going on in India because my brother's Indian father-in-law ran a bunch of red lights at 2am" is ridiculous.
Its not a race thing, but maybe it is a culture thing. We certainly have our share of asshole drivers in the USA, but it doesn't at all compare to what I've seen elsewhere, in terms of quantity / quality.
The apology is meaningless; this has nothing to do with buttons. I merely pointed out a generalization based on an random anecdote, based on no real experience of the situation. Acknowledging it as such would help.