Everything seemed vaguely familiar the moment I stepped out of Delhi Airport into a hot and humid night and got on to the highway.
Then I realised it was the driving that caught my attention. Tiny Maruti cars were jostling for space on a four-lane road and the guys behind the wheel had at one point magically turned it into a six-lane one.
You need nerves of steel to manoeuvre these flimsy vehicles through the chaotic traffic and killer buses and the motorist on my right, who casually glanced at my worried face, held a mobile phone to his ear with one hand and had the nonchalant air of a petrol-head barrelling down Shaikh Zayed Road with one hand on the wheel.
The Maruti cars are the result of a collaboration between the manufacturing genius of Japan and Indian ingenuity. They are small and fit in nicely wherever there is a gap in traffic and the owners proudly announce that it belongs to them, with signs on the back windows in Punjabi such as “Babla de gaddi”, meaning Babla’s car.
Surprisingly, you also see Mercs or Beemers, but they seem out of place on the potholed Indian roads. Don’t even try taking an auto-rickshaw and shouting to the driver to “follow that car”, just like James Bond did in the movie Octopussy, as it would jolt your spine and send you moaning to a physiotherapist.
With all this chaos, there is also constant cacophony of horns as motorists warn you that they are going to do something dangerous if you do not give them the right of way. Sometimes, they are just being nice and honk at pedestrians politely, advising them not to walk across the road as it would send them to a hospital.
Incidentally, most trauma patients arrive at a hospital in an auto-rickshaw, according to a single column story in a newspaper. Nobody calls an ambulance — maybe because it would take ages to get to the hospital, unlike auto-rickshaws that would zip you in and out of traffic. But what your condition would be at the end of the ride, nobody but the doctors know.
The doctors in Delhi send you off to get a zillion tests and a report warned that the health care sector there makes money under the table.
What seemed familiar was the way everyone drove in Delhi and reminded me of a trip to a neighbouring emirate of Dubai. “The cousins of these guys must be living in Sharjah,” I told myself. Wondering where everyone had learned driving, I looked up driving schools on the web.
‘Flattened like pancakes’
A driving school in a place called Defence Colony said this on its website: “Learning how to drive a motor vehicle is a major obstacle in one’s life ... Getting a driving licence is easy, but being a safe driver is very difficult. Our unique way of teaching will help you drive safely and with confidence in only two lessons.”
One good thing about Indian motorists is that almost everyone follows the law and puts on the seat belt. After that, it is every man and woman for him or herself.
To make it even more alarming for a visitor, a leading English-language newspaper had this on its front page: “Delhi roads India’s most dangerous.” But that did not faze me, maybe because I had been to places that are even more dangerous for those who use personal transport.
“I have seen cars flattened like pancakes on the side of the highways,” I told a friend, trying to show off that the accidents in Delhi are no match to the ones where I live.
But I made a mistake when I said that I was a defensive driver and the only tickets I ever got were parking tickets. He then lost all respect for me.
