Driving in India

Driving in India is an experience by itself. You will be amazed to find that everything you thought was a fundamental driving rule ceases to exist here. It all starts with the honking. Its not necessary for someone to be obstructing your path to honk. Cab drivers honk at random. Its like they have a frequency for honking. If they don’t do it at the right interval perhaps they feel choked, like a smoker who needs a smoke after a meal.

Then comes the variety of horns. Have you come across a reverse horn? Someone needs a tune to be played every time he reverses his car. Fancy no one came up with a melody every time you switch on your indicators. If you think this was the darnedest thing. Along comes a bike and guess what? This person has a melody tune attached to his brake. Every time he hits the brakes a tune is played. Someone came up with this bizarre idea and put it into production. Who would have thought there would be takers for it?

I am yet to come across anyone who has attached a melody brake horn to his or her car. It’s totally baffling why someone would need a tune to be played every time they hit the brakes? Can’t people behind them see that they are slowing down? Are they trying to help the Blind? Did they expect blind people to be driving? Maybe they reasoned out what if a blind man is driving right behind? he hears the tune and goes.. Oh the guy in front of me is slowing down I too need to slow down too. Won’t be surprised if one day you suddenly hear an Orchestra being played right in the middle of the road. Surprised you look out of your window and turns out the signal just turned red, so all our friends with their melody horns just hit their brakes.

The next big surprise is Cattle on the roads. Now don’t jump to conclusions, we are talking about ‘Indian’ cattle and that’s not the same as cattle anywhere else in the world. Picture a cow on the road in a western country. It goes all berserk running mad like the world is coming to an end. Its an incident that gets covered on the local TV channel, Traffic comes to a complete halt. In India it’s a different story, Cattle know how to handle themselves irrespective of the volume of traffic. They walk graciously at their own pace going wherever they are headed. Similar to pedestrians in the west, where the pedestrian is king and traffic stops for him if he wants to cross the road. The cows in India think the same way. They just cross when they want to cross and traffic stops to let them pass. But if you’re a pedestrian in India and try the same, then either you have some nerve or are totally nuts.

Driving in India is considered a privileged task. There are people who just drive, they don’t do anything other than drive. If you happen to notice a courier delivery van. It will have a driver and a fellow employee sitting next to the driver. Now why do we need two people here? can’t the driver deliver the courier and collect the acknowledgment ? Is that too complex a task? If that’s a complex task then how come a person who has the intelligence to deliver the courier cannot drive the van? Must be that driving in India is like flying a 747 jet, which the courier delivery guy cannot do, and its below the dignity of the driver to do the deliveries.

In a nutshell you need 3 things to drive in India. A loud horn, plenty of sense and a lot of luck. If you happen to bump right into someone while driving, It does not matter if you were on the right and the other person was on the wrong side of the road. The first thing the cop will ask you is, Did you blow your horn? If you didn’t then its simply your fault, how could you not blow your horn?

-Cd