Holy Cow - India "the ancient, the eternal and the ever gnu"

I was last in India about 15 years ago. Despite the striking image of cows, my one unerasable memory of India is the sense of humanity. An ocean of humanity. My return to India in mid-August reaffirmed that memory.

On arrival at the airport, I was picked up by a driver, and we then drove over three hours to the university where I am staying and teaching.

We travelled on highways that were covered in cars, motorbikes, rickshaws, buses, bicycles, pedestrians, dogs, cows in roughly that order of frequency.

But there was more - trash, monsoonal rains, water flowing along the roads like a river, and speedbumps - all slowing down the flow of traffic. Yes, that is speedbumps on highways! Everyone has to slow down to gently climb, scrape, grind over these massive lumps.

At some point in the long journey, I started to make a calculation of how many people we were passing. There were often four or five lanes of traffic going each way. (The word 'lane' is used loosely because line markings are either ignored, or if used, they are straddled the way a taxiing aeroplane uses a line.)

So, I estimated that I would pass at least five cars going the other way each second. The average number of occupants in each car varied a lot, but it barely ever was just one, and could be as many as eight or nine or ten people. In addition, I did not count motorbikes (with one, two, three, four or even five passengers) or buses (who knows how many).
So let’s say conservatively that we pass five people per vehicle on average which gives us 25 people per second going the other way.

For simplicity, I simply ignore those travelling the same way as me and my driver, that is, those whom we passed or who passed us.

So, that is 1,500 people per minute, or 90,000 people per hour. I travelled for over three hours and therefore passed 270,000 people – which is about half the population of the Gold Coast where I live!

So that is the sea of humanity.

But there is another sense in which India simply bellows humanity. The people are just so human. There so much room allowed for other humans to be human.

Take the rules of the road. They are pretty simple. There are none!

Rules and regulations limit individual freedoms whereas Indians appear to recognise that each individual is different, each individual needs to choose their own path. And they generally allow room to others to do just this. 

Take the lines marking the lanes on the road as already noted. They are not prescriptive, not indicative, merely suggestive. Mostly they are completely irrelevant.

The traffic on the roads behaved like a crowd leaving an enormous sports stadium. Everyone was going in the one direction. Well mostly. There were a few places where vehicles would turn and then return against the great flow of traffic. And no-one got too excited about that.

In general, the crowd of cars were steadfastly pushing forward with each individual finding their own speed and those wanting to go faster would weave their way through. Like the stadium crowd, there was chatter and occasional communications with others, spoken through the endless hooting of horns and many messages painted on vehicles.

Many vehicles feature signs such as "blow horn," "horn please," "keep distance," "stop" (presumably so you remember not to run into the back of this vehicle! And then some vehicles have these running together apparently calling for an end to the endless hooting: "stop horn please" (see picture).

Some drivers (like mine) appeared to use their horn almost completely at random. We were in no special danger, no clear evidence of being blocked, no one in our way and no one about to collide with us - and he would toot the horn. Just like mindless chatter to the person next to us: “Great game, eh?”

Or perhaps he used the horn to keep himself and other drivers awake. My driver was clearly getting drowsy –and who can blame him. It had presumably taken him about two to three hours to get to the airport, and longer to get home as the 'normal' endless traffic jams swelled with the Rakhi festival crowd celebrating brotherly and sisterly love and duty.  

At one point, due to his tiredness I suspect, we nearly pulled into the stopped car in front. On this single occasion, I said to my driver ‘Hey, watch out’. I think that if I hadn’t, we would have had a fender-bender. With all the sensory overload, there were at least some experiences like a physical collision with another car that I wanted to save for another day.

At one point, a motorbike pulled past with a husband and wife with child jammed between them. Seconds later, we saw the woman and the child sprawled on the road. Fortunately, the accident was slow and no-one appeared to be harmed.

At another point, a car pulled over and people were swarming around a woman lying on the side of the road. Perhaps she had been hit by a car, perhaps she had collapsed. I don’t know, but I was struck in both instances how there were people everywhere already hunkering down to help.

The lack of rules and regulations, the benign and constant communication and interaction with others, the sense of genuine concern. In all these ways, India spelled out not just humanity as in a mass, but humanity as in humane.

For all the chaos, I'm struck at how it works. Sort of.