The very idea of dedicating a post to traffic in Delhi is ambitious, to say the least.
Traffic rules the city, it sets the pace of your life here and it’s an uncontrollable force that never leaves you alone.
Because traffic is noisy. None who hasn’t traveled on Indian street has any right to talk about acoustic pollution. I come from a place where at the entrance of every urban center there’s a sign saying you can’t horn unless it’s absolutely necessary. And I live in a place where behind trucks, buses, sometimes even cars, you read the hand-painted magic words “Please horn”. And, you bet, everybody does what they he is asked asked to do. Everybody horns. Always.
They do it because, as our traffic is regulated by sight (lights on, mirrors), theirs is regulated by acoustic. You don’t see a car coming, you hear it. So people here horn even when there’s none on the street, just as we would not turn our car’s lights off.
A further sign of the reduced importance of the combination seeing+driving can be found in all those cars with side mirrors flipped in: you don’t want to ruin them, do you?
And this to me is THE prove that yes, western society is built on seeing equals knowing, and no, it doesn’t work like that everywhere.
Traffic never leaves you alone because it’s noisy, and because it’s enormous: a multitude of trucks, buses, cars, auto-rickshaws, cycle-rickshaws, motorcycles, bikes, carts pulled by bikes, pedestrian, cows, elephants, camels occupies the street every hour of the day (and, believe me, of the night), a moving being transporting millions of people and tons of things around the city. Lanes? What? Those slow down traffic. So much I could be said about the anarchy of Indian roads, but I will leave you the pleasure of giving it a look by yourself, watching any of the YouTube videos that come out searching Indian traffic.
In this madness, what you would never expect are traffic lights with a count-down chronometer on top of them, telling you how many seconds you have to cross the road, or wait at a red light. But since this is India and India never cease to surprise you yes, there actually are quite a few of those. They are probably more common than pedestrian crossing, or proper side walks. But since this is India and India never cease to surprise, their count down can be quite long. Long like 300, 299, 298.
A five minute long red light seems much longer if you actually keep staring at the count-down monitor. Try.
