A lot has been said about driving in India. The traffic is indisputably debilitating. Much is said about the lax rules, the poor city planning and the livestock in the streets, but Indians never criticize the real root cause of all the traffic – the Indian Driver. And once you know the reasons, you will know India.
There is absolutely no forethought into anything an Indian driver does. For instance, lets say that you need to turn left. In civilized society, somewhere between the time you realize this and the actual left turn, one would slowly make their way to the left side of the road. Not here! Indians will drive in the far right lane of a three lane, busy road until they are parallel with the left turn and at the last possible moment, push their way across all lanes. To compound the problem, no one will actually let the car cross they road, so the violator ends up blocking parts of at least two lanes as other cars push around it. The lack of forethought combined with the absolute inflexibility to yield conspire to catalyze a minor inconvenience into an hour-long traffic jam. There is absolutely no give and take. Everyone just simply keeps moving forward eating up every available inch of pavement until the entire road is gridlocked and at a standstill.
Today I went to the bank which is on an access road along one of Delhi’s busiest roads. The access road is under construction and the one lane of the street is dug up. As we were leaving, two cars met head on in the narrowed section. This, in any other country, would have been rectified in seconds by one car backing up while the other went through. Not in India. They sat honking at each other while cars now began to build up behind each motorist effectively blocking their reversal. To make matters worse, cars began to come up the opposite side of the road blocking any chance of a compromise. What you had in less than 10 minutes was two lanes of cars, numbering 30, facing each other across a 20 foot one lane road. We choose a different route, but it was not without coaching my driver whose natural inclination was to add to the melee.
This is absolutely a microcosm of how Indians behave in every situation. There is no common good, only their own. You will see this in every interaction you have with them from business dealings, to the grocery store, to a common elevator ride. The when the doors open, the people waiting push in and gridlock the people trying to get out. It slows the process to a standstill, extends the time needed on each floor and generally frustrates all the foreigners aboard. No one thinks through the problem!
I remember many years ago in a psychology class, the professor explained an experiment by a famous behaviorist (the name escapes me). A dog was tied to a stake and the rope was just long enough to reach a bowl of food set in front of the dog. Another stake was put in the ground and the rope was routed around the second stake that made the rope slightly too short for the dog to reach the bowl of food. For days, the dog simply barked at the bowl of food mere feet from his nose, but it never occurred to him to reverse himself around he second stake and take the most direct route to the food.
This is India. Absolutely no one thinks through the problem and everyone is in such a hurry to take what they believe is theirs, whether it be the last inch of pavement on the road, the space in the elevator or part of the estimated $14 billion that went toward corruption on last years Commonwealth games, that no one every stops to think how much they could really get if they just thought through the problem and developed a mutually beneficial solution.
It is a shame, because they had such a bright future!
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