Horn! Ok! Please!

Countries are described, in realistic veracity, not by their fiscal wallop or military power, not by cultural legacy or natural wealth, nor even by their political structure and past. They are described by their traffic. Yes, you read that right – Their traffic. Show me a country’s roads, and I'll explain you its very essence.

Ponder on it for a second. Germany has the Autobahn, where not-so-deprived engineers in greatly-engineered Porsches pursue the broad lanes at 300 km/hour. Americans are confined to 80 km/hour, but they cover up for that speed as they are conceived, born, exist, work and even die their cars, which are equipped with striking gadgets like TVs, hydraulics, fax machines, cell phones and GPS that divulge where “the stars live”.

Singapore is devoid of roads, having recreated the concept. In its place, with its miles and miles of very tapered recreational areas and green gardens through which cars are allowed to bypass, it has lifted driving from development to epiphany, telling us that fate is above destination (apart from the fact that you could get beaten for entering a prohibited zone without a permit).
Which takes us to India-- ah, Incredible India, where roads are not a path to travel, to get from here to there. Roads are in fact here and there. Roads are walked on, spat on and slept on, in India. Roads are utilized to stock up and winnow the rice harvest, to dry acres of masalas, to milk the khandani cow. Roads are used as provisional stores. Not only is every kind of transport is found on each Indian road, but all kinds of living creatures are found walking here and there. Buffalos, goats, elephants, camels are steered in front of squealing busses. Elephants halt loyally at the red lights while buffalos and cows wander pointlessly and heroically.

While life in US of A is lived within the car and not much of it subsists on the street, while in India it's all out in the open. Bicycles and buses brawl for their parking. Pedestrians, making use of a NASA-constricted form of Doppler-oriented sonar software that permits them, without looking back, to "spot" automobiles impending from rear and stylishly step to the side precisely 10 nanoseconds before being crushed to death. This is to say, in India there are no traffic regulations of the average kind one finds elsewhere. Signals prohibiting littering? What’s that?! Penalties for jaywalking? Forget it! No street people? Cummon, everyone is a street person. Speed limitations? Who would implement them anyways? It's an anarchistic land, India's highways, where every individual formulates his/her own rules and regulations.

But hey! In the nonexistence of man-made rules and regulations there must be some cosmic codes leading 1 billion people in their exigency to transform cars into massacre. Certainly, rules are present, but like fortified secrets of yoga, they are known only by the initiated. They have never been merged, construed and decoded.

Now, all of you might be wondering and in fact believing that the tone this post sounds like that from a typical “Phaaren returned Indian”. Well, the fact is contrary to this. The chaos, the confusion, the dirt, the grime, the confusion on the roads, the honking noise of the horns, the pedestrians who come on roads for a leisure walk, the foul words hurled at co-drivers, the clumsy bicyclers – I love it all. It feels like home to me. In fact recently, a few of my friends asked me whether I find it difficult to drive in India. My answer was an obvious “No ways!”

Commuting on Indian roads is an almost hallucinatory mixture of noise, sights and experience. It is often heart-ripping, sometimes amusing, often thrilling, always etched in your mind--and awfully hazardous.

India's traffic therefore exposes her very soul. India is audacious and able to endure just about anything. She is powerful, compound beyond understanding, and slightly untamed. She is dexterous, companionable and never insecure. She loves freedom more than law and risks the elevated road of faith in the religious procedure while others pursue the safe lanes of control.

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