Babu, Samjho Ishare!

The road is a democratic space (or anarchic, depending on your point of view) in urban India. Chaotic, with its own unwritten rules…the same space is shared by the person with the biggest and the smallest vahan (vehicle)...almost like Lord Ganesha and his mode of transport, the little rat! The huge Toyota SUVs, the small Marutis and its many avatars (the Zens, Indica….etc.), the speedy motorcycles and its cousins, the scooters, the street food vendors, the cyclists, autos (who can forget them?), the buses, the mini-buses, the extinct rickshaws, and of course cattle all share the road, making no effort to carve out their space…the horns blare at a constant rate, but there is a certain way in which this works (quite mysteriously!). The knack is to anticipate any move the other person makes, and also to wriggle in and out of the tiniest space between the vehicles, except of course if you are a cow or a bull or a buffalo! These rules then don’t matter to our four-legged neighbors. They can stop the traffic at any point, and frustrate others without any fear of being clobbered to death by a fellow rider.