drive to die another day

A family rides on a motorcycle. It's not just a husband and a wife. There are two kids sandwiched between them, fast asleep while their parents negotiate the snarl that is Indian traffic.

A family on a motorcycle prepares to subvert politeness and courtesy by squirming through a path traced between cars waiting abut and behind one another at a traffic light. The husband, wife and three children are banking on luck (which usually favours such ventures in this country) to get them past this point.

Young motorcyclists practise their racing and navigation chops on roads at the risk of scaring and confusing drivers trying to get home. These beacons of danger are wearing helmets. They're making sure they take all the precautions while putting others at grave risk. They also don't realise that physics does not take sides. All it takes is a little nudge to the equilibrium for us to hear squealing brakes and screams and watch another young life get snuffed in a matter of seconds. Or worse: someone maimed for life, left alive to regret their mistake forever.

Selfishness abounds regardless of the dimensions of the vehicle. Each person wants to rise above the unpleasant jam that he or she is faced with and does it by edging ahead and around, eventually creating another version of the jam further ahead. A motorcyclist and the driver of a cement roller agree in this regard. The larger your vehicle is and the more likely it is for it to create more mayhem, the more likely you are to go ahead and effect chaos. By circumventing the problem instead of confronting it and dealing with it by courtesy and fairness, they only contribute to its growth every minute of every day.

eternal riders of pune

After a fresh experience of the roads in Pune lasting several days, I am ready to conclude that the average Puneite on the road (on foot, gripping the handle of a motorised two-wheeler or a bicycle, helming an autorickshaw, car, van, bus or truck) has three significant qualities: he or she is discourteous, he or she is selfish and he or she is suicidal. Despite this lethal combination of qualities, he or she seems eternal. untouchable by death. amar. imagine that. The font of eternal life must exist in the murky miasma of the traffic jams in Pune: how else does one explain the lack of significant fatalities on the roads when everyone (regardless of their size or the size of their mode of conveyance) is trying to squeeze into every available space of every size at any imaginable speed? That woman sliding between a bus and a jeep passed through without a scratch; that scooterist swung cleanly a breath away from the noggin of a large van; those two cars crissed and crossed by a motorcyclist without affecting his path or angle at all. Unbelievable.

offshore rush hour

I see a lot more of the kerfuffle at ramps and roads and badly synchronised traffic lights leading to the various interstates today. This could clearly be just a combination of the rains that have subsided, the time and the general preponderance of unscalable urban design. It could also be because a lot of people are rushing to work to get a few really productive hours, because their counterparts across the shores are busy watching the India/Pakistan cricket match today. No more phone calls laced with blather; no more nighmarish vistas of horrible code. Just some peace and quiet. Unless the gamesmen of the tricolour decide to emulate dominoes, of course.

innovations in city planning

Zebra crossing, India style (TM): As part of the latest wave of converting roads to one-ways without enough planning, the civic authorities rolled out the most intellectually baffling version of a zebra crossing ever known to civilised man. Here's how it works: once a suitable spot is chosen (using brown magic of some kind), the familiar strip of white stripes is painted over it across the width of the road. At this point, the most obvious next step would be to set up a pair of traffic lights, one light on either side of the road, so that pedestrians could cross when needed while vehicles waited for the light to go green. This is where the immensely gifted pan-chewing minds occupying the various administrative structures in the city unleashed their gift upon the tax-paying residents. They created a speed breaker just before the zebra crossing and pocketed the money for the lights. Lest you start screaming in administrative angst, let me remind you that this ensures compliance with the prevailing state of affairs: a constant race between vehicles and pedestrians for a slice of the road. The speed breaker is a supreme stroke of genius – try sitting with a splitting headache in a rickshaw. By the time the journey's done, your head will probably feel like an Olympic race track. Did I neglect to mention that each speed breaker has its own design? (watch out for the squiggly, the ramp-walking camel, the war veteran and the inverted pothole)

stereotypes on the streets of Pune

(being an unpolished draft from a visit back home several months ago)

There is a reason Pune roads are never going to get better no matter how many flyovers you build, no matter how many streets you convert to one-way traps, no matter how many regulations you prescribe on termite-eaten papers of law, no matter how much you try to subvert the laws of physics with the power of unenforced law. That reason, dear hapless smoke-ingesting, Brownian reader is the rich and variegated set of stereotypes of riders and commuters unleashed on the streets of Pune. This helpless spectator presents a few.
The Light Brigade: Even if Tennyson's poem loses its impact because people no longer cared about the Crimean war, it would survive thanks to finding another image in the real world –- this is the critical mass revving up near a traffic signal awaiting the change from red to green desperately like the incontinent in search of a ceramic throne. Even before the chromatic switch, a deluge of multimodal impatience sweeps the intersection and intersecting streets. It's the chariot race from Ben Hur duplicated across space and time.

Neo wannabes in the Metropolitan Matrix: You're familiar with the commuters who behave as if they had received an internal memo saying they were Neo Anderson and that they were the One. Assuming all surrounding traffic to represent the Matrix, these people waltz across crowded intersections (causing even graver deadlocks), shimmy through cracks between cars, along invisible tracks connecting the front wheel of a scooter to the rear wheel of a motorcycle making a game of snakes and ladders look like an exercise in drawing perfectly straight lines.

the brownian ecosystem ... sans impact

After getting used to the sight of lanes and order (except for the frequently occasional idiot) on the roads and highways in the US of A, it's a little refreshing to see how things were (and still are, mostly) back home in desiiland. Here's a video of Indian driving close to its prime -- the lack of severe traffic allows for more visually stunning results. Each person did his/her own stunts; no one was injured during the filming of this clip.

Recommendation: Hit the "Pause" button and wait for a while till the player caches the clip (how long? depends on your bandwidth, ISP, fellow pirates and the like). Once enough time has passed, hit the "Play" button and watch closely.