Last week I took a client to Agra to see the Taj. We planned to do the Delhi to Agra leg of the trip by road and return by air. The idea was to give them a glimpse of India beyond Delhi airport and glass buildings of Gurgaon. As we drove out of GGN, the India way of life was on display, in full force. I won't be exaggerating if I were to say that India lives on road! Best shops, commercial establishments and residences are supposed to be right on the main road! You can find barber under the road side Neem tree to children squatting on the road, everything from eating, drinking, making a living to relieving happens on the road! Then there is omnipresent cow and dogs in good measure.
Beyond a few named towns and cities in India, most towns are linear, they stretch along the main road that threads its way thru' the town. There is hardly any depth to these towns as there is no road to make them grow deeper. Along the road is rubble and more rubble, rubbish and varied color plastic bags that are strewn all over. Chaos is omnipresent! You can see vehicles driving on the wrong side of the road, vehicles stopped bang in the center of the road. Vehicles that come in all forms and shapes, animal drawn carts, vehicles with 2 wheels, 3 wheels, 4 wheels, 6 wheels, 10 wheels and people walking in between these vehicles! you can find vehicles whose top speeds range from 10km per hour to 230km per hour, all vie for space on road that seems to be increasingly getting narrower, as more and more people do business on the road!
If you closely watch how people go about their daily life in the middle of all this, you will find no sign of anxiety or restlessness. All that people see around them is so much part of their life that they don't feel odd.
I sometimes wonder, is this our collective failure as a society that we have stopped getting bothered about the mess that we seems to live in or is it our success as a society that given the mess around us, we are still able to keep our cool and calm and go about doing our business without getting paralyzed by it!
Beyond a few named towns and cities in India, most towns are linear, they stretch along the main road that threads its way thru' the town. There is hardly any depth to these towns as there is no road to make them grow deeper. Along the road is rubble and more rubble, rubbish and varied color plastic bags that are strewn all over. Chaos is omnipresent! You can see vehicles driving on the wrong side of the road, vehicles stopped bang in the center of the road. Vehicles that come in all forms and shapes, animal drawn carts, vehicles with 2 wheels, 3 wheels, 4 wheels, 6 wheels, 10 wheels and people walking in between these vehicles! you can find vehicles whose top speeds range from 10km per hour to 230km per hour, all vie for space on road that seems to be increasingly getting narrower, as more and more people do business on the road!
If you closely watch how people go about their daily life in the middle of all this, you will find no sign of anxiety or restlessness. All that people see around them is so much part of their life that they don't feel odd.
I sometimes wonder, is this our collective failure as a society that we have stopped getting bothered about the mess that we seems to live in or is it our success as a society that given the mess around us, we are still able to keep our cool and calm and go about doing our business without getting paralyzed by it!
It has become the 'Indian-ness' that sometimes we feel proud of and sometimes we abhor, as per our convenience.
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