Was it a dream? It seemed like a dream…. a bad dream. We were headed the wrong way into oncoming traffic on an interstate highway, at high speed. Cars and trucks flew at us from the darkness, threatening collision, mayhem and death in an instant.
Typically, the mere realization that “this is a dream” wakes the dreamer up. But as the seconds marched past, I didn’t wake up. Ominously, I could recall now why I was here. It was no dream. My very-sleepy brain had been jolted wide awake for that moment, but was still trying to collect itself. Is this for real? Apparently yes. What happens now? I wasn’t sure.
***
I.
It was the fall of 2011 when I had my first opportunity to visit India. I was still pushing to get my tiny consulting company off the ground. Business was solid but always felt tenuous. I was always looking for the next project. That week I found myself inside a big office building in suburban Houston, high up on the 35th floor, editing documents and arguing over the finer points of some arcane calculation with one of my two clients. My phone rang and I excused myself to answer it. It was Eric.
Eric was a friend and fellow freelancer. Some time earlier he had pulled me into a big project, which paid the bills for almost a year. That gig had ended and we had parted ways; but now a few months later he was reaching out with a new opportunity. A client in India had some big plans and wanted advice. Eric had secured a small consulting contract worth maybe $15,000 in total and he could split it with me. Could I join him to advise on some key topics? As with any new business in those days, my answer was a quick and direct “yes.”
What “yes” implied, in this case, was to be on a plane to Mumbai in several days. But I had no visa; and Indian visas at that time required several weeks to obtain. A visit to the Indian embassy was the only way to expedite the process. So three days after my call with Eric, I was on a flight to Washington DC. There I would apply in person for a visa at the Indian embassy, then fly back to Atlanta that afternoon with visa in hand, and then fly out from Atlanta to Mumbai that night. It would require some luck. I was very aware that my fate was tied to the efficient functioning of India’s embassy and Delta airlines. (Of course neither of these is a great bet as a stand-alone proposition, and much less so in combination.) Despite the obvious, this rickety plan was somehow successful, and I found myself on an airplane to Amsterdam, and then to Mumbai, where I arrived around 1AM local time.
Mumbai’s process for customs and immigration was orderly enough. It was hot and I was tired, and the room was packed with travelers. But I made it quickly to the front of the line, where my visa was stamped by a sweating official with a dark and permanent frown. Departing forward through his gate, I entered a long hallway from customs toward the terminal. The hall was clean, modern, and almost silent. Only my muffled steps and those of a few fellow travelers interrupted the quiet. The lighting was low, with the main lamps turned off and only some minor backlights remaining, much like any long hallway in an empty building in the middle of the night. Walking deliberately through the calm corridor, I felt the deep tiredness of the world traveler. I had been on an airplane, in an airport or in an embassy for the prior 36 hours. During that time, I had slept the way one sleeps in such places: poorly, or not at all.
Walking down the empty corridor, I assumed the airport terminal would also be vacant. I hoped my driver would be there. Indeed, now I could see this was the more rickety and risky part of the plan. If my driver was not there, I would be all alone in the Mumbai airport at 1:30am. Eric had provided me a phone number of the client. But that would be in Pune, 100 miles away. I doubted anyone would answer at this hour. That is, if my phone even worked.
I mused on these topics as I approached the end of the walkway. There, the terminal doors opened and a blast of tropical heat swept over me. Blinking my eyes, I quickly understood there was no risk of being alone. There stood 200 or more drivers in a ragged pack, held back from the cordoned walkway by two security guards. About half of the drivers held signs, some in various Indian dialects, some in English. The drivers stood or crouched or sat, all crammed against each other; speaking loudly over each other. Some were hawking rides directly. I heard voices as I entered the walkway, saying loudly “Driver sir; Sir I can drive you… Sir I am your driver!” Now I really hoped I would see a sign with my name on it.
And I did. I locked eyes with the man holding the “William Taylor” sign and pointed at him with eyebrows raised. He pointed back and very quickly snuck out the back of the throng, circling around to meet me at the exit. He was a youngish man in his mid 20s, cleanly dressed and courteous. The driver spoke English, but in a thick accent that I struggled to understand. He insisted on carrying my bags and walked them quickly to his car, parked in a nearby deck. I had trouble keeping up.
Once inside his clean white Suzuki Maruti, he offered me a bottle of water and explained, I think, that we are going to Pune and it will take a while; perhaps two hours or more. That was no surprise. But I quickly calculated that, given my exhausted state, I would be asleep for some of that time. It was not a comfortable calculation. I was in this man’s hands; if I was asleep he could drive me anywhere, and I would be helpless to protest. Then again, being awake wasn’t much better. Hadn’t he been retained by the client? And didn’t they arrange rides like this all the time? I wasn’t sure of anything, and it was too late to engage in critical thinking. I drifted in and out of sleep as we sped past the vast shanty neighborhoods of Mumbai, and past the hordes of Mumbai pedestrians who were somehow still in the streets at 1:30am.
On the main highway toward Pune, our speed slowed to a crawl and then a stop. Hulking diesel trucks, many hand-painted with colorful local decoration (as is the style in India), dominated the road, filling in the dark space around us. All the vehicles that were pointed eastbound, including ours, stood still. On the right of us, just across a gap-filled concrete barrier, the westbound traffic was flowing smoothly at 60mph. Several drivers ahead of us had stepped out of their cars and were chatting. My driver was cross. He looked in the mirror at me with a furrowed brow. “Sir, this traffic is hard. Very hard sir.”
“How long must we wait?” I asked.
“Several hours sir. Very hard.” He craned his neck to see, though there was nothing to see except for six lanes of trucks and taxis in a stationary line, waiting to move, and a blur of westbound traffic across the barrier.
To this point, the motion of the car had kept me somewhat awake. My driver had expressed, in words I did not entirely understand, that he meant to deliver me to my hotel in Pune “punctual sir.” Earlier, when it was possible to do so, he drove fast. I had considered asking him to “please slow down.” But he didn’t seem to understand my English. I was resigned. My fate was in his hands. It seemed the best course was simply to wish him luck and pray for safe arrival.
Stopped in traffic, the car was motionless. I dozed off minutes later. As I fell asleep, the driver said something to me about making better time. I nodded yes and closed my eyes again.
When my eyes re-opened, we were cruising at 40mph…. heading the wrong-way, into the oncoming traffic of the westbound lanes! White headlights shined directly on us through windshield. Other drivers leaned on their horns as they swerved to avoid a head-on collision with our taxi. The differential speed was terrifying. Tiny distant headlights sprang from the blackness and swelled into massive trucks in mere seconds, flying past us with horns blaring. We jogged from lane to lane, trying to keep out of the way of the oncoming cars and trucks.
My driver had taken, not a U-turn to double back to where we had come from, but an “S-turn” to continue to Pune on the highway we were on…. just in the opposite direction of the legally-moving traffic. He had taken this route with purpose and dedication, resolved to get me there in a punctual manner. Apparently he was not adverse to a heightened risk of fatal head-on collision.
In the moment I was very afraid. But some part of me also found it funny. “Death smiles at us all,” said the philosopher Marcus Aurelius. “All we can do us smile back.” I smiled back for just a second, but then ducked in panic as a westbound motorcycle blazed past. “This is bad,” I mumbled to myself.
When tired and under duress, and headed into oncoming traffic, what do you do? My first thought was that, although I needed to express dismay at this arrangement, I didn’t want to spook this driver. His heroics were, in that moment, keeping us alive. So instead of protesting with screams, I sat forward in the seat and said “Wow! Careful!!” This made him realize I was awake. He saw my concerned face in the rear-view mirror. “Just one more mile sir.”
I thought of texting my wife. But what would I say? “I love you, I’m in danger here?” “Pray for me?” This seemed not a great idea. Instead I texted an old friend, and let him know I was in the back of a cab, outside Mumbai, driving very fast and I hoped I would live. This seemed enough that he could share it with authorities if I never came home, and they could find me in the morgue. “Hopefully it will not come to that” I mused.
It didn’t come to that of course. A mile later we took a turn off-road, caught up to a local highway and headed in the proper lane and direction toward Pune, arriving at my hotel around 3:30AM. I was to meet the same driver at 7:30AM in the hotel lobby the next morning, to drive to the client site. Despite my exhaustion, I had a hard time falling asleep.
II.
India is a special place. As I went about my business there, I remembered the old adage from Vincent Vega, who said of Europe that “…they got the same shit over there that we got over here. Just there, it’s a little different.”
India isn’t a little different. It’s a lot different. In the roadway for example, you will find not just vehicles but also horses, cows and sometimes chickens, dogs, and other animals. The cows are considered sacred. To strike one with a car would be a kind of intolerable blasphemy. But even for the dogs and chickens, there is some ingrained sympathy among Indians. Yes these animals are in the roadway and that is a dangerous place….but these creatures require space to exist, as any of God’s creatures would. Surely we should not infringe upon that space without cause.
And of course the roadway is also populated by people. Many, many people. India’s population is roughly five times that of the US, and it’s land mass is roughly one third the size. That amounts to a population density 15 times higher in India than in the US. In Pune circa 2011, many of those people were, if not riding a motorbike, then standing, walking, sitting, conducting business, essentially living in the roadway.
Observing the streets of Mumbai and Pune, I tried to make some sense of it. India seemed to be a humanistic place. Despite poverty and its related problems, human beings matter in India. As an Indian person, you have a right to exist! And to exist means to occupy space. No less than the dogs and chickens, any person is entitled to at least the space that they currently occupy. This thinking leads to an interesting outcome: as a human being, you have a right to stand in the road. Which you do. Along with your many, many countrymen who are also standing in the road, who also have a right to stand there.
So what I observed in Pune, in those few days in 2011, was as follows: There are jaywalking laws in India. But no one enforces them. There are sidewalks in India. No one walks on them. The road is where the people go. The wealthier few who have cars, go in cars. Those who have motorcycles go on motorcycle. Some go by bicycle. The rest go on foot. These road-going pedestrians don’t seem to care care that cars may strike them at high speed. They have a right to be where they are. Which, at that moment, is the road.
I made similar observations regarding traffic intersections: There are stoplights in India, but no one stops for them. There are lanes with markers indicating the allowable turns, much as we have the US. But no one follows them. A traffic intersection in India is something akin to your driving school instructor’s worst nightmare: everyone enters the intersection at the same time and everyone tries not to hit anyone else based on their own ad-hoc judgment.
My initial impression of all this, as an outside observer, was that it was insane. Truck, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, sacred cow, dog, cat, and mouse all in the roadway, all mixed up together. None of them were following any posted traffic laws; all seemed highly likely to collide with each other at any moment. And yet, despite its obvious insanity, it worked, more or less. People got where they were going. Cars avoided striking people; people took action to avoid the cars.
The fact that carnage was not unfolding didn’t make it less alarming. Over the next three days I felt a resigned and terrified awe, as my driver drove me through the streets of Pune to and from the client office. All these people and cars were there in the road, and we sped toward them and they sped toward us in cars and rickshaws and on motorbikes or walking, but all moving in many directions and we were moving faster toward them and then, and then…. we just kinda glided past them all, through the intersection and along our way.
I learned quickly that it wasn’t just my driver. It was everyone. Walking to dinner with Eric, we walked in the roadway with the throng of pedestrians… into oncoming traffic on the road. When cars came we moved toward the side and they went past us, repeatedly missing us by mere inches. A few days later we met my old colleague Milind who hailed from Pune. Touring the old city we crossed busy streets on foot, not by waiting for the stop light to change (which of course meant nothing to drivers anyway), but literally wading into the traffic. And not stationary traffic but moving traffic. Potentially fatal traffic.
As Milind taught us, we would cross the street by stepping out in front of the cars; not recklessly but with some determination, implicitly requiring the automotive traffic to find its way around us. And against all odds, it did. I cringed with fear as I took three long steps into the street, stopped to let a microbus zoom by at 30mph just inches from my face, then strode out into the gap behind it. So then, because I was in that gap, the two approaching Suzuki Marutis split apart and drove around me, one on each side of me, with 3 feet or so between them into which I fit. All at 30 miles per hour. Lane by lane I proceeded, across the six lanes of traffic, praying cars would avoid me somehow. And avoid me they did, until I reached the other side. It seemed miraculous to step out of the street alive; as if the invisible hand of fate had gently adjusted the trajectory of each individual car, just slightly, to ensure my safety. It was madness; but it was also very peaceful, as if some fearful beast was realized to be not a beast at all, but an intelligent and benevolent giant.
We know, academically and by common sense, that traffic rules are needed. Stopping for red lights, walking on sidewalks instead of in the roadway, adhering to right-of-way indicators and lane markings…. these rules we deem to be important, generally speaking. Absent traffic rules, we would expect collisions, injuries, fatalities and the like to emerge all around us at a grim and terrible rate. But observing the reality on the ground for a short while, based on anecdote and observation, we might suspend this belief and see a world where traffic rules are optional and needless. With no traffic rules, somehow it still seems to be working. Isn’t it? It’s surely different than what we’re accustomed to. But It works, kinda.
Or does it? Upon further observation with data, tragically, it seems we were right all along. In India around 150,000 people die in traffic accidents annually. That’s a four-fold increase over the same value in the USA. And the USA has many more registered vehicles, and drives many more miles in those vehicles, compared to India. So our basic traffic rules save something like a hundred thousand human lives annually… the lives of mothers and fathers, children, friends and family. Ah well. We had a hunch that traffic rules are important. And we were right.
“Break all the rules.” We like sayings like this. “Rules are made to be broken. “The first rule is there are no rules.” And so on.
No one says things like “Rules are good and a necessary part of life.” Why not? None of us wish to live in a world with no rules. Rules create order. Rules help us to coordinate our behavior fairly, in a traffic intersection for example. The anarchy of an unruly society is really a miserable thing. We rely on rules to live, quite literally. When they disappear, they are sorely missed.
Or at least that was my feeling at the time.
III.
Back in the US, a year or two later, I was abruptly cut off and nearly struck by a Mercedes Benz sedan. It roared suddenly across my path from the right rear direction, into and across my left-turn lane, where I had been waiting patiently for a clearing in oncoming traffic… a window of opportunity that was just then forming as the light turned yellow, and which I was just about to take, when this Mercedes stole it. It was doubly jarring because I was in the process of “gunning it” to get through the yellow quickly. So for a half-instant I was hard on the accelerator; and in the next instant I was hard on the brake and barely avoiding collision. As I jammed my feet on the brake in fear, the Mercedes zoomed leftward through the gap and rolled off. I was left stuck sitting in the intersection under a red light, my heart racing from adrenaline, as the Mercedes drove away.
After collecting myself for one second, I darted out of the intersection and onto the tail of this marauding Mercedes-Benz, with a grim frown on my face. I was mad. In that moment I wanted to shake that driver. I imagined an opportunity to slap him to get his attention. “What the hell!? You think you own the road? You could have gotten me killed, you selfish ignorant asshole!” I was on his tail and closing fast. I was ready to get in his face. In that instant I was too angry to ponder what “getting in his face” meant… probably something like flipping him a middle finger, if traffic would allow me to just get alongside him.
And as I approached him, my mind started planning the mechanics of my forthcoming bird-flip. The moment was almost there. But then, in just a few seconds, something very different happened. I pulled alongside the left-rear of the Mercedes, rolling slowly alongside toward the drivers window. There I saw a head of curly auburn hair. This Mercedes driver was not a man but a woman. A woman with beautiful auburn hair, driving a navy blue S-class of older vintage. Reality dawned on me. I froze in my seat as I approached. The light turned green just in time, and she rolled away, just fast enough so that I wasn’t forced to look at her face.
There are few women anywhere with beautiful hair like that; fewer still in Greenville South Carolina driving a classic dark blue Benz. This was no random stranger. This was Elanor, a family friend. And not just any friend; but a special friend and a special person; a true gem of a human being. This person was (and is) the most gracious, most caring and true-hearted woman in all of Grenville. To me and to my wife, she was like family. Hell I had been at her lake house for Memorial Day earlier that spring, drinking a beer with her husband and sons and playing cards, while my kids swam in the lake with her grandkids! This was the driver of the Mercedes who almost hit me. But upon reflection, clearly this near-miss wasn’t intended or malicious but merely an oversight. She simply hadn’t seen me there. It was a simple mistake. She meant no harm and harbored no ill feelings…. in fact she didn’t even realize what had happened.
Driving home slowly from there, I felt disoriented. I played the scene back in my mind. In our roadway interaction she had clearly broken the rules of driving, and I had not. And yet upon further reflection, it seemed I was in the more guilty one. Or maybe we were both equally guilty; but my crime was more serious. She broke some traffic rules, violating the lane right-of-way and passing in an intersection. But I was the person who felt the anger and the ugliness. I was the one who chased her down, and almost flipped her the bird and yelled something obscene. She was the lawbreaker, but I was the angry and bitter one. She had made an honest mistake. I had made a choice.
Marcus Aurelius tell us to “Remove your feeling of having been offended, and the offense itself disappears.” Fate had provided a warm and gracious human being to teach me this lesson, which made the lesson artfully clear. And after more time I realized: my anger was the wrong choice anyway, no matter the driver of the Benz. Anger and aggression, generally speaking, are not pushed upon us, but a choice we take. The feeling of offense was mine; and therefore mine to remove.
And as I exited my mediation on that event, I felt a new feeling and held a new idea in my head. It seemed that the rules of driving had somehow enabled my anger. After all I was unharmed. Why was I so flustered and angry? What made me so pissed off? Well… I wasn’t sure.
She had broken the rules.
That’s all I could come up with.
IV.
Here in the US, as in much of the world, we have traffic rules. People mostly follow the traffic rules. When two cars come to an intersection, rules allow them to coordinate a right set of actions, to avoid collisions. Pedestrians following rules, and cars following rules, can safely co-exist with separation of merely a foot or two. Rules keep us safe. That’s just “how it works.”
But it wasn’t always thus. What is obvious to us now, was controversial in the recent past. After all, roadways have been around for many thousands of years. Cars only showed up a hundred years or so ago. In particular if we look at city streets, it wasn’t so obvious in the America of, say, the 1920s who should “be” in the road? Cars, pedestrians, or both?
In the 1800s streets were made for horses and pedestrians. They were often unpaved an unmarked; and seldom lined by sidewalks. In such an environment, there was no uniform or obvious rule that people should “get out of the way.” What we now call jaywalking, was not viewed as a problem back then. Or if it was a problem, it was as much a vehicle problem (and/or a horse problem) as it was a pedestrian problem.
Cars, with their comparably frenetic speeds, changed all that. As automotive society emerged in the 1910s and 1920s, the road was increasingly divided between the roadway (where cars go), and the sidewalk or median (where the pedestrians go). Crosswalks and curbs were defined to control the overlap between these. Jaywalking statutes were created, to enforce these new rules on pedestrians.
These rules and guidelines seem obvious now; but things were less obvious back then. It was a new and largely unwelcome fact that this new device, the automobile, now owned the road. As a pedestrian in the early 1900s, you were suddenly disallowed from occupying your own roadway. How could that be? After all your ancestors had walked on roads for millennia, you had walked there for your whole life and you considered it public space for your own use. You had a right, or kind of a right it seemed, to be there. And now suddenly that right was gone. Your rights were seized, or at least de-emphasized, in deference to that machine contraption, the automobile. Your rights were secondary to the desires of the wealthy, who could afford such a contraption. It didn’t seem fair.
What had been called “walking into town” was now called “jaywalking.” It was a crime! In fact even the word “jaywalking” carried a hard edge. A “jay” was the derogatory term for a country rube… a hillbilly or redneck in our modern parlance. “Jaywalking” therefore was something like “walking in the road like a dumbass hillbilly, who doesn’t have enough sense to walk where he should.” When the term was first coined in the first half of the 20th century, it was meant to demean.
A quote from Oregon’s Rogue River Courier in 1913 was typical of the tone from that period: “The local automobile club today adopted resolutions suggesting propaganda to be distributed all over the country to ‘kill off the Jay Walker Family.’ Automobile clubs all over the country … will be asked to aid in exterminating ‘Mr. and Mrs. Jay Walker and all the little Walkers.’ “ That seems pretty harsh. Then again it’s not much worse than the feelings I was about to spew at my Benz-driving friend. No worse really than reclassifying a pleasant daily activity into “jaywalking.”
It seems harsh to scream and swear at a fellow driver; or to flip them the bird. It seems harsh to casually discuss the extermination of families, who might not be on the sidewalk. Somehow driving is harsh. Drivers are harsh. We’re mean-spirited when we drive. Why?
I think the rules have a lot to do with it.
Which makes me think, maybe there’s a deeper and darker reason that we hate rules. It’s because we understand what rules do to people. To other people yes; but also to ourselves:
Rules make us mean.
Traffic rules are the perfect example. They’re a necessary part of modern society, because they prevent needless death. They work. But are they healthy for our frame of mind? How does our mind process them?
I don’t think I ever heard anyone give thanks for the rules, or express thoughtfulness about them. They don’t seem to engender any goodwill. (No one says “That traffic light is so diligent; it got it right again today, all day, just like clockwork. Not a single collision. Amazing!”). No, mostly the conversation around traffic rules is angry conversation. It typically goes like this: “Some jackass broke (traffic-rule-X) on my way to work today. Can you believe that??” We all talk this way; myself included. We are angry about those rule-breakers! We are indignant. By the rules, our indignation is justified.
But that’s the thing about indignation. Even when it’s justified, it’s still ugly. Things we would never say to a stranger, we will scream out loud to a stranger that breaks a traffic rule. “You fucking moron!!” Did I ever yell such a terrible thing at anyone? Of course not! Um, except for when I’m driving, in which case I say this (or similar ugly things) all the time. I think many people do this. The rules somehow enable this bad behavior from us. “He broke a rule; he’s fair game.” That’s how we think. It’s not really about the rule itself. It’s about how our human minds react to the rule.
Whenever I say something ugly, now I try to think back to Pune highways, and all those driving habits. Of course it was terrible, safety-wise. Yet somehow, no one seemed to take it personally. I seldom heard my driver or other drivers yell or express anger. It was a world filled with bad behavior… obviously bad behavior.
Yet somehow in that place and time, where the rules were absent, it seemed indignation was also absent.
V.
I returned to India eight years after my first trip. It was for a different client in a different circumstance, and with less frenetic planning in the days prior. And it was a different part of India this time. My business now was in Noida, a suburb of Delhi in the north of the country. This time my driver spoke much better English. He was somewhat older, perhaps in his mid-50s, with a serious face and a measured, deliberate manner. Though not young he was physically fit, walking with his chest out and handling my heavy suitcase with one hand. I guessed he was a former military man; and in fact he scanned the parking lot as we walked, with the air of a de-facto bodyguard. Compared to my first driver he walked slower; he spoke slower. And he drove slower.
Not only slower: he drove safer. Although it was after midnight and the streets were relatively calm, he stopped at each stoplight, waiting for green. He stayed in his lane, using turn signals to change lanes. He deferred to others at intersections, plotting a conservative course. As he drove on, I realized I had harbored an inner fear of more driving insanity; and it had tightened my mind and my manners. Slowly realizing that this man was a sane and rational driver, I felt a gradual relaxation of my reflexes. I was safe, more or less. It was a good and unexpected feeling.
In the following two days I struck up conversation with this veteran driver, whose name was Mr. Bhist. I described to him the antics of my prior driver in Pune some years ago. He smiled and explained that, while all drivers know the rules of driving, not all follow those rules. “So, we must be safe in our driving” he said, “we must remember such drivers are also, you know sir, they are there, they exist.” His terms seemed to suggest a club of responsible safe drivers like himself, the “we” in his phrasing, who would offset the irresponsibility of the others.
“You see as we drive here; we must go a careful fashion; because a car can come from any direction, any time.” Indeed I did see. “Maybe someone comes at us from a wrong way” he gestured with a straight-ahead wave, to suggest a wrong-say driver, reflecting my prior concern. “We know it happens so we must, you know sir, we must pay good attention; the best attention.”
This Mr. Bhist has grown up driving in India, likely with even fewer rules and lesser commitment to following them. To drive into such chaos, he and his countrymen had adopted a conciliatory code of conduct and a vigilant state of attention. As a driver he saw his responsibility to others, even the irresponsible others. If insanity could happen on the roadway, his duty was to overcome it with diligence and calm. And not just himself; but the royal and aspirational “we” to whom he referred. “We must be aware, because they are sometimes unsafe in their actions.”
I checked this statement with the engineers at my Indian client. They smiled and laughed, and agreed. “You know the drivers are crazy; so you prepare for it, you drive as if everyone else is crazy,” said one good-natured young engineer. “It just becomes a habit.” The others nodded their heads in agreement.
Of course India is a big place, and not everyone everywhere agrees on every point. A good friend from India didn’t see it as caution, so much as a heightened state of awareness. “When you drive there, you take your life in your hands,” he said. “You can’t afford to be timid. But you must be aware…hyper-aware, of those around you.”
This viewpoint was subtly new to me. And it explained some things. How had I really survived the wrong- way episode eight years prior? At the time, it seemed like luck. But looking back, it was largely a function of this highly-aware approach; an approach taken by so many strangers, in the dark of night on a crowded highway far from my home. It was that same awareness that had allowed me to walk into traffic in the Pune city center, and let the traffic flow around me and somehow feel, inexplicably, safe. At the time it had felt miraculous. And it was miraculous… miraculous that so many drivers would plot such a careful and aware course… even as I broke obvious rules of traffic and common sense. Their aggregated awareness and reaction was indeed a benevolent giant. It wasn’t luck or fate; it was the uncoordinated action of many perfect strangers, quietly operating their cars with awareness and calm, that kept me from harm.
India is growing, and its laws and rules are maturing. Returning in 2019 (again to a different part of the country), it seemed the situation had incrementally improved. Yes stop signs were ignored and motorbikes hopped casually from street to sidewalk and back again. But overall the level of chaos was less. I saw at least one instance of traffic stopped at a stoplight, and pedestrians walking in the crosswalk while drivers waited. And then the light changed and the pedestrians stopped, and let the cars proceed. They were taking turns. It was happening, with traffic rules, gradually over time.
Another observation in 2019 was the cover of a magazine, showing a smart young Indian man driving a car with in a state of rage, screaming in anger. It was a story on ‘Road Rage.’ The idea had to be explained in the magazine story, as if it was a new idea. But the article made a convincing case that such rage was rising, even as the rules were becoming more prevalent.
Someday I imagine traffic flows in India will roughly mimic the Western world. Traffic rules will grow in importance, rule-based behaviors will curb the fatality rate and society will move forward. That is a good thing. And yet also a sad thing. It seems India’s drivers are becoming more like ours: better at following the rules, but less aware. And maybe meaner and uglier to each other when those rules are broken.
And that’s the way the world works. It gets safer and meaner, less fatal but less miraculous, as time goes by. It’s a little tragedy, wrapped up in a bow of common sense. And while a part of me wants to stop time and preserve the patience and awareness of Mr. Bhist’s generation, I know it is not possible. Along with a rule-based future comes a generation of harder-edged, more-indignant drivers… drivers more like the ones I encounter in America. The world evolves, in this case toward more rules. Something is gained, and something else is lost. It is progress; it is right; it is sad. There is no one to blame. It just is what it is.
Or in the summary words of the philosopher Epictetus, which I now understand better than I did two decades ago:
“An ignorant person blames others.
To blame oneself is proof of progress.
But to the wise man, all blame is folly.”
Bill Taylor, October 2020