Experiencing lateral inversion!

If I was to rewind back to school days, my NCERT science text book would have defined lateral inversion as “The effect produced by a mirror in reversing images from left to right”. In Kerala, I experienced “Lateral Inversion” in a somewhat different way – for some fuzzy reason, in a statistically significant way, most people got ‘left’ and ‘right’ wrong on most occasions. With time, I understood that ‘left’ is ‘left’ and ‘right’ is ‘right’ only as a matter of ‘convention’ and probably there is no strong logic behind that. On the contrary, with ‘up’ and ‘down’ there is some bit of ‘gravity’ rationale that comes into the picture.

To remain attuned to rest of the world, I decided to mentally define ‘right’ as ‘right’ symbolized by a few subconscious, yet logical rules – I started off with “I eat with my right hand”, shifting gradually to “steering is at the right of a car”. Beyond that stage, I don’t quite remember ever having problems with left and right. So in all probability, “steering is at the right of a car” is the ‘internal rule’ that over the years my directional sense has been calibrated too!

Through my existence on planet earth over the last 2 decades and my experience with excel modelling errors, attempts at solving ‘limited-information-case-studies’, trying my luck with Sudoku puzzles and attending structured communication training workshops, I have come to the conclusion that ‘assumption’ is what determines the ‘outcome’!

This is exactly what I experienced on my trip to Europe. Till then, fate had almost cherry picked my driving experiences as purely ‘right-hand drives’ – India, South East Asia, South Africa and Australia. On my trip to U.S., I took a bus from Boston to Capecod. With the intention to experience the ‘left hand drive’, I went and sat next to the driver, in the front. I was left in a state of being ‘zapped’ in a few minutes – possibly a combination of jet-lag and ‘left to right’ transformation on the road left me in that state. It was strange weird feeling – I couldn’t get to terms with the fact that on-coming vehicles were passing-by at 100 miles an hour to our ‘left’!

This November, Maharaj and I rented an E-class from Stuttgart (Germany). Since I had a valid license, I was the one behind the steering wheel. Frankly, I was a bit apprehensive to driving on the right side of the road. I tried various things to convince myself of this transformation, most notably being – ‘driving on the right side of the road, should by definition be the right side of the road!’

My over-cautious side took over for sometime – I drove at the minimum possible speed, shut the music off, kept 100% of my focus on road and tried to follow the arrows on the road. It all looked very weird! Maharaj was trying to give some fundaes and vibes about driving in Germany. I shut him up and said “… and you rustic! Keep shut and utter only when you find me heading on the wrong side of the road!”

Well, it took me probably half an hour to get used to this left to right transformation – with no better phrase to describe this, I coined it as ‘lateral inversion’!

By day-2 of our drive, I had completely lost it all. I had lost the sense of left and right. There were many occasions when Maharaj told me to turn right and I peacefully took the left turn! Given the rusticity of the situation, Maharaj came to my rescue by putting some rustic vibes – finally, we found a reason to cover up this goof-up and blamed it all on the human brain in general. Apparently, human brain can’t distinguish between left and right without any frame of reference, while up and down is governed by gravity.

I am back to the driving convention world that I am comfortable with. Inverse lateral inversion was rather easy – I got my directional sense right on my Avante during the very first minute of the drive. But, wait a minute, is right the right way to look at it when I am myself not sure if right is right and not left? Would Wright Brothers have the right answer to this mystery? Why are right hand drive cars more suited for left side drive? Confusion prevails, so does lateral inversion!