-- By Tom Phillips
A lot has changed in India since I first went there in 1978. But its psyche feels the same: Driven.
India is the only place I know where the energy is higher than New York. In New York, motorists are warned not to honk their horns, on pain of a $350 fine, which deters even though it is never enforced.
In India, everyone honks their horn continually, 24 hours a day. You honk when passing, turning, speeding up, or just getting angry. Indian drivers keep themselves at a boiling point. On our first night in the country we hired a car to go from Delhi to Jaipur, a 250 km straight shot that took five hours, from midnight to five a.m. Nearly all the way the four-lane road was clogged with brightly painted, heavily used trucks carrying cement and other materials for India's never-ending national construction binge, honking their way around each other, jockeying for position. In India, the preferred position is the center of the highway, straddlng the white line. Here you are King of the Road.
Our driver was Surinder Singh, a Rajput warrior from Jaipur, who loves his car and defends it against threats and slights, real and imagined. Half-a-dozen times he stopped the car and leaped out to wipe the windshield, scold the driver behind, dispute with a toll collector, or drive home a point to the guy next door. (The Encycledia Britannica notes the ethos of the warrior Rajputs includes a "mettlesome regard for personal honour.") He told us proudly that he lives in a part of Jaipur open to Rajputs only -- no other caste allowed.
Surinder takes tourists all over India, and sleeps in the car when his customers check into a hotel. The passenger seat folds flat like a first-class airline chair, so he made it up as a bed for Rusty, after his marathon flight in economy class.
Halfway to Jaipur, at three o'clock in the morning, we passed a noisy parade of pilgrims, in buses and on foot, waving a flag and blasting music from boom boxes. It was the start of a Hindu festival honoring Lord Krishna, right on the heels of a national veneration of Lord Ganesh, the elephant god, the hugely popular remover of obstacles. The Times of India reports Ganesh is so beloved that the cast of a hit TV series took time out to perform the climactic pageant of the festival, right on the set. Fake news, celebrity news, pictures.
Behind India's energy is religious devotion, sectarian rivalry, and a fervent desire to make money. New York has only one of those three, how could it compete?
--- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips
India is the only place I know where the energy is higher than New York. In New York, motorists are warned not to honk their horns, on pain of a $350 fine, which deters even though it is never enforced.
In India, everyone honks their horn continually, 24 hours a day. You honk when passing, turning, speeding up, or just getting angry. Indian drivers keep themselves at a boiling point. On our first night in the country we hired a car to go from Delhi to Jaipur, a 250 km straight shot that took five hours, from midnight to five a.m. Nearly all the way the four-lane road was clogged with brightly painted, heavily used trucks carrying cement and other materials for India's never-ending national construction binge, honking their way around each other, jockeying for position. In India, the preferred position is the center of the highway, straddlng the white line. Here you are King of the Road.
Our driver was Surinder Singh, a Rajput warrior from Jaipur, who loves his car and defends it against threats and slights, real and imagined. Half-a-dozen times he stopped the car and leaped out to wipe the windshield, scold the driver behind, dispute with a toll collector, or drive home a point to the guy next door. (The Encycledia Britannica notes the ethos of the warrior Rajputs includes a "mettlesome regard for personal honour.") He told us proudly that he lives in a part of Jaipur open to Rajputs only -- no other caste allowed.
Surinder takes tourists all over India, and sleeps in the car when his customers check into a hotel. The passenger seat folds flat like a first-class airline chair, so he made it up as a bed for Rusty, after his marathon flight in economy class.
Halfway to Jaipur, at three o'clock in the morning, we passed a noisy parade of pilgrims, in buses and on foot, waving a flag and blasting music from boom boxes. It was the start of a Hindu festival honoring Lord Krishna, right on the heels of a national veneration of Lord Ganesh, the elephant god, the hugely popular remover of obstacles. The Times of India reports Ganesh is so beloved that the cast of a hit TV series took time out to perform the climactic pageant of the festival, right on the set. Fake news, celebrity news, pictures.
Behind India's energy is religious devotion, sectarian rivalry, and a fervent desire to make money. New York has only one of those three, how could it compete?
--- Copyright 2019 by Tom Phillips
