Well, as you might guess, I made it safely back from India yesterday evening. Although I only spent about twenty hours in the air, total transit time was some forty hours since the trip was made up of four flights from Pune, India to Nashville, Tennessee. That makes for an awfully long day. Even so, I managed to get just the right amount of sleep on my various aircraft that I timed my tiredness on Friday night just right!
As you know, I traveled with two other colleagues. Our company very kindly allowed us to travel business class. I’ve made a lot of long-distance flights, but never two back-to-back. One flight in economy is okay, but two like that would have been rough. Going business definitely made it much more bearable!
Anyway, the point of this blog entry is to share some random memories of my trip with you. I won’t bore you with the activities at the office in India. This is more about the Indian culture.
Let’s start with travel – particularly travel by road. There appear to be only two highway rules: drive (mostly) on the left, and just look out for yourself – allowing others to do the same. Other than that, the roads are pure chaos. In the cities, traffic moves at a crawl just about everywhere. Few of the streets actually have lane markings on them and those that do are ignored. Where a road is wide enough for two cars to pass, the locals will somehow manage to squeeze four in the space. You have heard of bumper-to-bumper. Well, this is mirror-to-mirror, too!
It’s not just cars. There are trucks, buses, motorcycles, pedal-cycles, motorized rickshaws, taxis, oxen-carts, hand-carts, and people all sharing the streets. You want to cross traffic at an intersection? Just do it… go slowly enough and other road users will yield to you. That’s the theory anyway. The amazing thing is that it works, although not without liberal horn use! It all makes Parisian drivers look like a bunch of Sunday outing drivers.
There doesn’t seem to be any limit to the capacity of these various vehicles, either. Rickshaws have been known to carry 14 people at a go (these are small three-wheeler vehicles), and I witnessed – and photographed – a family of four on a single motorcycle!
When you rent a car in India, you don’t just get the car. It comes with a driver, too. I didn’t drive myself anywhere during my entire visit. I’m actually quite pleased about that. Adventurous as I am, that traffic was a little freaky. These drivers are amazing. If necessary, they will just wait on you all day. It doesn’t seem to bother them at all.
Taxi and truck drivers seem to take particular pride in their vehicles. These are very often hand-painted very decoratively. Trucks almost exclusively have the words “Horn OK Please” painted on the rear bumper. We found that particularly amusing. The taxis are tricked out with all sorts of natty little things, none of which enhance the actual performance of the car.
Did I mention the population of the two cities that we visited? Mumbai, at 18 million, is the third most populace city in the world. Pune is much ‘smaller’ and ‘just’ 3.85 million. There were people just everywhere. Because these areas are so densely populated, there seems to be very little concept of ‘personal space’. That was a little bothersome at times.
India’s economy is booming very fast. So quickly, in fact, that the infrastructure has no chance of keeping up. I may have mentioned the smog in Mumbai before – sometimes so thick that it would make the eyes water. Pune was better, but the air was still far from clear.
Almost every road seems to be undergoing some sort of road work. The surfaces are typically quite bumpy. Since there is a huge surplus of cheap workers, most road and building construction is actually done manually, rather than using expensive machinery. We frequently saw women using scoops to excavate road workings. It was quite amazing.
Indian society seems to be very class-conscious. The wealthy tend to be very rich, and the poor tend to be completely poverty stricken. Men, women and children begging in the street were a common sight. Just about every intersection that we stopped at would have someone knocking on the car windows trying to sell some cheap thing for a little cash.
One intersection in Pune was particularly heart-wrenching. It was ‘manned’ by a family of mother, daughter, son and baby. The mother held the baby while the two children performed. The boy would beat on a drum while the girl did cartwheels and dislocated her shoulders. After their short performance, they would come to car windows to ask for money. They were all obviously close to starving.
I’ll wrap up by talking a little bit about the clothing. While most men wore what I would call ‘western’ style clothing – a shirt and pants – most of the women wore traditional Indian saris. Apparently, men’s traditional clothing costs about $100, while they can pick up western clothes for a tenth of that.
Since the women wear the traditional sari, it also meant that they typically rode sidesaddle as motorcycle passengers. I thought that was interesting.
Anyway, I hope that you get a small impression of life in India from this posting. As I think of other things, I might make another post later.
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