Driving in India: Taking it to the Streets with the Mahatma

Don’t just take our word for it. Driving in India is tough and they know it. DLA research staff was impressed by the number of sites and blogs dedicated to confronting national plague of mayhem, danger, and discourtesy. And although I have been firm in reminding them that mayhem, danger, and discourtesy can be found on any corner here in Boston, the DLA staff was equally adamant in maintaining that India’s story was one that had to be told. I relented and agreed to one more posting on driving in India, something of a bibliography of DLA’s web research.

 
Street Signs in India:  Yeah, this will be on the test!

Many of these sites seem to be a result of the gandhigiri wave which struck India following the 2006 musical comedy, “Lage Raho Munna Bhai,” in which an underworld bigwig sees the light after beginning a series of conversation with a picture of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhigiri, essentially the practice of Gandhi’s tenets of truth and “truth force”, is something of a phenomenon in India. Disdained as “flower power” by some, practitioners hand out roses, apply its non-violent approach to social issue protest, launch volunteer work, and, yes, even work to bring gandhigiri to the nation’s driving problems. Thankfully, the DLA staff is made up mostly of MIT grads or near-grads so it isn’t likely that they will be swayed by the idea of handing out roses at the Andrew Square off-ramp. But you never know.

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Licensing + Bureaucracy = Long Lines + Bribery…Massachusetts got 3 out of 4

"You never want to share the road with someone who truly believes in reincarnation"

Anyone within earshot of CNN earlier this month could not have missed the announcement at the New Delhi Auto Expo of Tata Motor’s “Nano”, a one-lakh ($2,500), thirty HP, two-cylinder, one-wiper blade car. Most of the world-wide buzz centered on either the market significance of the new car’s price point or around the spectre of its environmental impact once 30 or 40 million of these things hit the streets. 

Driving in India? You'll need one of these and, well, some big ones. 

But here at DLA, researchers knew that 30 or 40 million new cars would easily equate to 300 to 400 million new drivers. Where and how would they would learn to drive could provide DLA research staff with an in situ opportunity to glean behavioral insights from another country in our effort to understand Boston’s ass-like driving.

Unfortunately, as often seems to be the case, DLA’s trademark—the thoughtful, deliberate response to driving behavior—was, while certainly thoughtful, a bit too deliberate and we were trumped by Somini Sengupta's piece in the January 11 The New York Times, “Indians Hit the Road Amid Elephants.”

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The DLA research staff, exhausted from translating and interpreting Chinese, Polish, and Japanese data, has begged to return its focus to driving research topics closer to home, namely Boston. I am happy to oblige since, as the staff always reminds me, there is no lack of baffling behavior that screams for analysis right here in our own back yard. Furthermore, it is winter and winter is generally accompanied by inclement weather, blessing the eager DLA staff with wonderful, seasonal examples of driving like ass.

But, before closing out our international entries, I want to share some additional data provided by Peter Hessler whose article in The New Yorker, spurred the DLA staff to launch the search for international and cultural factors in ass-like driving.

Thanks for the note, and for the link to your site, which I found hilarious. When I was very small my family lived in Beverly, MA, and the drivers in Boston left a deep impression on my father. He spoke of them often while I was growing up in Missouri.
In the Peace Corps I lived in Fuling, a small town on the Yangtze River. In that town virtually every cabbie had wired his horn so that it connected to a contact point located on the gearshift. A horn on the steering wheel was not responsive enough for their purposes. A friend of mine visited from New York and was overwhelmed by the way they honked. When he finally left, we took a cab down to the docks, and he counted how many times the driver honked during the 15-minute ride. It came to 566, no exaggeration. (I describe this in my first book, River Town on page 66.)
All the best –

Peter

Although virtue is rumored to be its own reward, I would encourage all readers to purchase this book, if only on the grounds that Mr. Hessler was kind enough to respond and because the DLA research staff seldom receives appreciative feedback from readers other than our mothers.