One thing that has remained constant in Delhi is the madness of driving. For those of you who have been on the roads in Delhi, you will know what it is like. For those who haven't driven in Delhi (or India), here're the basic tenets of driving:
1) lanes do not exist;
2) your aim is to kill other people on the street - you will get more karma points for each person killed or knocked over;
3) use the car-horn liberally - at least once every two minutes;
4) do not wear your seat-belt - it's such a fashion faux-pas and it's more exciting!;
5) pack at least 7 people into each car - the more the merrier!;
6) drive with no more than 1 litre (1/2 gallon) of petrol in the tank - why not take a risk? it's good exercise to push the car to the nearest gas stationor you ca always call your personal driver to rescue you at 3am/from the club/the National Stadium (this happened to us) ; and, finally;
7) do not use your rear-view or side-view mirrors - this will make you liable for your own safety...a bad practice in Delhi (see below)!
In my opinion, there is a governing philosophy that somehow prevents a mass carnage of accidents from happening - this philosophy is called "Sudden Invincibility Syndrome" or SISsyness. It consists of three rules:
1) Survival of the largest - the larger the vehicle is, the more it can do what it wants, such as swerving into the middle of traffic without looking. Consequently, everybody lower down in the size hierarchy has to keep watching out for any larger vehicle. The only exception is animals which are always avoided. The hierarchy (from largest to smallest): any animal, truck, bus, SUV, car, three-wheeler, scooter, bicycle, pedestrian.
2) The ostrich or head-in-the-sand maneouver- If you don't look to see where you are going, then somebody else is totally responsible for making sure that they don't crash into you. Sample activities include buses joining traffic circles from the left without looking to see if there is anybody else already coming that way (forcing anybody already on the road to watch out for a sudden appearance of traffic from the left), pedestrians walking across the street without looking to see if there is any traffic about to run them over, and cars moving into oncoming traffic to overtake the car in front of them.
3) No-space-left-behind or the "getting to know your neighbor really well" syndrome- All available space on the road has to be taken up. For example, at a traffic light, if you leave even half a yard between your car and the car in front of you, then several bicyclists and scooters will edge into that space while you are waiting.
Note: This also applies to queues for movie tickets, train tickets, and bars. When you shoot the offending person the "Smruti look of death (TM)" because they have encroached in your personal space, they look back blankly, as if they don't know they have totally cut in front of you (the 2nd grade rule of 'no cutting' doesn' t seem to be in effect here) or they will steadily ignore you by staring straight ahead, dodging your daggers-of-evil stares.
It's a total mystery why this only seems to bother non-locals.
Addendum: Now that we've also spent a considerable amount of time in Bombay, we have evidence to support the existence of Immediate Death Syndrome (IDS or Idiots) in the taxi-drivers of Bombay. A condition of Idiots has just one key symptom - at all intersections, especially when there is a red-light signalling the taxi-driver to stop, he (mostly he's rather than she's) will gun the engine and accelerate into the pedestrians who have swarmed across the road in the blithe (yet, in Bombay, completely wrong) assumption that a green pedestrian signal means that they have the right to cross without being killed. Of course, this sudden course of action by the taxi-driver (sometimes several taxi-drivers together in a sort of killer phalanx) results in the immediate scattering of the pedestrian crowd in the quest of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
-Dev
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