Life on the Road

Since we spend so much time in our car driving to and from school we have observed a lot about daily life through our car window.

Driving in Delhi is like playing bumper cars at Great Adventure. There are absolutely no rules on the road. Cars, buses, tractors, motorcycles, auto rickshaws and wandering cows all use the same lanes, and on occasion in both directions at once. Lane driving is a completely foreign concept to Indians who incessantly honk their horns to tell others to get out of their way. I found that Indians always assume that the other driver will get out of their way...and they usually do.

It’s all too chaotic and aggressive for my driving taste so I opted out and hired a driver. Sanjay, on the other hand, thinks he has the “right stuff” to navigate the roads and has been pretty successful except for one fender bender when he miscalculated the distance between an auto rickshaw and a 4-seater (with 7 passengers crammed in) that he was trying to squeeze in between. 

Driving in the outskirts of Delhi can be even more nerve wrecking because the roads are one lane highways. Indians are inherently impatient people, especially on the road, so they can’t stand slow vehicles in front of them. Drivers typically overtake slower vehicles ahead of them by going into the oncoming traffic’s lane even if a huge truck 300 yards away is coming straight at them at full speed.  The oncoming truck never slows down and at the last second the car swerves back into his own lane, kind of like something you'd experience in "Grand Theft Auto". There are many times I didn’t think I was going to make it out of the car alive but somehow Indians have this timing thing down to a science, or at least most of the time.  Indians love to live on the edge!

Back in Delhi, traffic is horrendous. There are too many vehicles on roads that were designed years ago for a much smaller driving population. With the emerging “middle class” many more people can afford motorbikes and cars. Rush hour is synonymous with gridlock. Then a 20-minute drive turns into 2 hours.

I have found the lack of passenger safety most shocking. Passengers never wear seatbelts, kids ride in the front seat of cars and whole families ride on a single motorcycle while the women and kids don’t wear helmets. New Delhi had instituted a law that everyone riding a scooter or motorcycle must wear a helmet but the Sikh community objected because they said that wearing any kind of headgear other than a turban was against the basis tenets of their Sikh religion. So Sikh men were exempted from the law and since it was impossible to tell Sikh women apart from non-Sikhs, all women were exempt.

Some interesting sightings from our car…A scooter tow…

People sleeping in the back of a moving truck

A herd of cows blocking traffic.

While sitting in your car, either in traffic or at a red light, one typically get barraged by foot peddlers or beggars.

Sometimes you even get entertained!

We see this old beggar every morning on the way to school. Priya looks for him every morning and gives him a part of her weekly allowance. He always gives her his blessings in return.