Indian traffic looks like suicide. And like anywhere in the world, sometimes it is. But as I briefly mentioned before, traffic in this part of the world just works differently, but it still works. In the United States, one could easily get away without having a working horn, many probably don’t even know that their horn has stopped working. In India, a horn is as important as a wheel.
Almost all vehicles seem to think that there is a beginning of the line that they can achieve, if only they pass all the cars in front of them. This is a perpetual occurrence that is not unlike salmon swimming upstream. For the most part, roads generally have two lanes, forcing passing cars into the next lane where an oncoming car might be.
At night it looks like your in a Starship in the middle of a space battle from Star Wars. The line “There’s….. too ….. Many of them, ahhhhhhh!” comes to mind.
There were many times during my ride when two pairs of cars (or even three stacked side by side) were heading straight for one another. The passing cars would each have to gun it for one another as those cars being passed rarely if ever slowed down to ease the overtake. Very often the space between the two vehicles over taking would be inches if not less when they eventually did soar past one another.
I am unsure if it is a credit to a control of fear or an acceptance of things that clearly lack sanity, but I can say that I grew to become perfectly comfortable being in the place of any of those vehicles.
Almost all vehicles seem to think that there is a beginning of the line that they can achieve, if only they pass all the cars in front of them. This is a perpetual occurrence that is not unlike salmon swimming upstream. For the most part, roads generally have two lanes, forcing passing cars into the next lane where an oncoming car might be.
At night it looks like your in a Starship in the middle of a space battle from Star Wars. The line “There’s….. too ….. Many of them, ahhhhhhh!” comes to mind.
There were many times during my ride when two pairs of cars (or even three stacked side by side) were heading straight for one another. The passing cars would each have to gun it for one another as those cars being passed rarely if ever slowed down to ease the overtake. Very often the space between the two vehicles over taking would be inches if not less when they eventually did soar past one another.
I am unsure if it is a credit to a control of fear or an acceptance of things that clearly lack sanity, but I can say that I grew to become perfectly comfortable being in the place of any of those vehicles.
it's a certain wild sharp edge that is lost in the masses of american cities and and especially suburbs. the cowboy spirit, wherever it resides now, has a similar essence. but isn't it awakening, frightening and challenging to be placed in another country's world where this life-death-fear-wild driving game is real and everyone knows the rules? makes you feel soft at first, but what a satisfying hardening, a kind of hardening that makes you malleable, flexible.
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