Good Brakes, Good Horn, Good Luck!

The theme of transport and traffic in India deserves a blog of its own, a post won't do it full justice. Traffic is beyond anything I have ever seen anywhere. There are lines on the roads and I imagine that there are formalised rules of the road, but the informal rules provide an unstable, but nonetheless, functioning equilibrium that makes "good brakes, good horn and good luck" the necessary cocktail for survival.

Every road is jam packed with vehicles, whether a small back alley among Jodhpur's blue houses or a raging six lane roundabout around Delhi's India Gate. Rickshaws with skinny, sweaty little men fighting to cycle up a hill; middle aged men on motorbikes (often frowning at the gora - white dude - as they pass by), honking incessantly with a needle-to-eardrum horn and a spotlight headlight, often with women wearing a full sari in traditional bright Indian colours perched on the back; autorickshaws, small three wheeled mopeds with a yellow and green shell, a leather bench and nothing protecting you from the outside traffic (often we can reach out to touch other cars), this is the cheapest way to travel if you can haggle; Tata cars full of commuters with their own driver...because driving in Delhi is "jhust t-hoo mach, jhust t-hoo mach"; buses packed to the brim with people, limbs popping out of each window and horns that echo all down the carriage (I don't know where the acoustics find space to echo); and Tata trucks full of rubble rumbling by, the wheels of which are often bigger than the autorickshaw you're sitting in.

Horns are not used to tell someone that "you're in my way asshole!", at least not most of time, as in the West. It's certainly not rude to use the horn, in fact, it becomes a courtesy. Most trucks have "Horn Please" written on the back. The horn is used to tell someone "I'm coming on your right/left side (asshole)!". Cars often don't have a wing mirror on the passenger side and even if they do, it's not being used. Instead the driver behind must let you know he's coming. To sum it up anecdotally, the blind spot becomes a deaf spot.

Survival requires pushing, shoving, knowing when to jump into a little spot and a lot of patience. And maybe some earplugs too.