...india has traffic collisions at ~9x the rate (based on rate per 100k vehicles) as the USA. If the USA had as 'very few accidents' as india there would be a major crisis and its just business as usual in india.

If you compare the way traffic behaves in India vs the US, you would agree that if you tried to drive like in the us you would end up with way more accidents than the ~9x figure would suggest.

Please enlighten us as to what some of these rules are. As an outsider it just looks like chaos but you can tell there's some kind of code.

Frankly, these are not easy to specify rules. Now if you were on the passenger seat when i was driving and kept on asking questions, then maybe we could unearth a bunch of these rules.

Things like you know when another car will not cut across, or when another car is going to hit the brakes or cut across are more a function of understanding how the traffic behaves and this is what helps a majority of us indians avoid accidents.