One Does Not Simply Cross the Street in Bangalore
Mom always told me to look both ways before crossing the street. I think she was trying to kill me.
American Germaphobe India Saga (part 8)
This is an ongoing true story (that starts here) of a work trip to India where I, a spoiled, frightened, American germaphobe, desperately cling to my waning sanity by finding humor in the fear.
In my last post I explained how India has in the last 48 hours extracted from me more “Yikes!” and “What the hell is that?!?!” exclamations than one might expect from a person of sound mind, and hinted of more to come given the unrefusable offer of my colleagues to “rescue” me from having to eat at the hotel restaurant by taking me out for a “nice” Indian dinner.
As it turns out, the word “rescue” means something different in India. In the States, being rescued generally results in a notable decrease to the amount of peril and discomfort one might otherwise have had to endure.
Apparently that’s not true here in India.
And the word “nice?” Don’t even get me started on that one.
HOW TO WIN AT NEGOTIATING AND STILL LOSE
After a day full of meetings, it is usually the case that I’m ready to find a nice, quiet, lonely place to hole up and recharge. The thought of extending the day’s social agenda with hours more of small talk and polite interaction evokes feelings of dread and despair in introverts such as myself. And so, as the afternoon wanes and the topic of “where will we take Scott out for dinner” begins to get traction, it’s all I can do to quell my fear and exude an air of feigned excitement, especially when someone gets the idea of extending the dinner plan with “and we could show Scott some of downtown Bangalore!”
I soooooo don’t want to do any of that, but I’m here at their invitation and apparently taking first time visitors out to dinner is like a tradition. To refuse would be rude.
I soooooo wish I could be rude and not feel bad about it. Stupid conscience.
As the evening planning conversation matures, it naturally arrives at the more existential questions of what shall we eat and where shall we eat it? My magnanimous colleagues begin to suggest various exotic cuisines one after the other, each time meeting my polite reluctance with an agreeable flexibility that slowly wanes as they run shorter and shorter on alternatives.
I, too, am taxing my own reserve of polite excuses, but I fear that if I lose this battle of attrition, I’ll likely be condemning all of us to some of their least favored options, so I persist, hoping to wear them down to something resembling the promise of a cheeseburger.
Fortunately I win. (Or so I hope.)
“Ok, how about we’ll take you someplace that has American food?”
Woohoo!
Score: Scott 1, Bangalore 0.
Next comes the question of “where.” I am more than a little anxious about being taken by car far enough out from the hotel that it will be a long night with no hope of escape. I’m a busy man, you see. I’ve got emails to read, Spots to swat, that sort of thing. Fortunately they are apparently of a similar mindset, and they choose a place nearby that is just a few minutes’ walk from the office.
This is perfect: it means that it is also just a few minutes’ walk back to my hotel, allowing me the option to abort this dinner operation should the conversation or food get too tedious.
(Or so I hope.)
Score: Scott 2, Bangalore 0.
Finally the day’s work is done and it’s time to depart. In an ideal world, this would translate into an immediate departure for the restaurant, but in reality there is a universal law which states that the readiness of a group to depart is inversely related to the number of people in the group. In layman’s terms: one person is always ready to go, two people are 5–10 minutes from being ready to go, three people are at least 15 minutes from departure, with four people it takes 15 minutes to get three of them ready and start waiting for the fourth, then at 20 minutes one of the three suddenly has to go to the bathroom, making it a 30 minute wait minimum, and so on. A corollary to this law is that the probability of the introverts of the group being ready first and thus forced to awkwardly wait together asymptotically approaches 100% as the size of target group grows.
THE ROAD ROBERT FROST NEVER IMAGINED…
After what seems like 3 eternities (I counted), the group is ready and we head out. The office manager I am calling “Bob” in a prior episode takes the lead. Exiting the office building, Bob heads toward a main street in front of the building.
I follow.
Now, it’s rush hour, what with it being the end of the day. But here in India, “rush hour” isn’t quite the same as we are used to here in the States. Granted, it is perhaps globally true that “rush hour” is oxymoronic in that there is a lot less rushing and quite a bit more waiting, but here it is a little harder to tell the difference between “regular hours” and “rush hour.” Imagine a roadway carrying 150% of its planned capacity, yet the chaotic movement of all the cars, trucks, rickshaws, motorbikes, buses, bicycles and miscellaneous quadrupeds is somehow still fluid and mobile, albeit at a pace somewhat less than optimal. What you are imagining is normal traffic here in Bangalore.
For rush hour, you need to jack that up to maybe 250% capacity without decreasing the overall velocity of traffic throughput.
It is this scene toward which we walk.
JAYWALKING LIKE A BOSS
As we near the street, I start looking — intently — for a crosswalk or some means of safely navigating this river of traffic, but I can find nothing of the sort.
We all arrive at the edge and stand on the curb along with a lot of other people who are also on this perilous quest for the other side. I feel like I’m standing precariously on the bank of an overflowing, flooding river, full of dangerous currents and deadly, moving debris. And just like a flooded river, this road also has a never-ending flow.
Literally.
It seriously has no end, and as far as the eye can see, there is not even a hint of a break in the traffic that might to allow us to cross safely.
I mentally prepare myself to be here for a while.
Suddenly Bob steps forward and begins walking into the traffic.
“No you fool, you’ll die!” is what begins to come from my mouth, but I quell this reaction as I quickly conclude that it is far more likely that he will in fact live and that I’ll die, stuck here waiting for a break in traffic.
“Go you fool, or you’ll die!” I instead mentally yell to myself, and I also quickly step forward after him and wade into the flow of traffic.
I have fear.
I also have brains, so I make sure that Bob is always positioned between me and the on-coming traffic. I think to myself that if I live through this, I need to remember to write a Thank You note to Saddam Hussein for teaching me the value of human shields.
For those reading this who grew up in the 80s, think “Frogger.” Only in this version you can’t go backwards, and worse, the attacking vehicles packed with no breaks between them and, instead of moving orderly and predictably in their lanes, they are instead all weaving in and out between and around themselves.
Bob seems to be proceeding on the premise that it’s “move or die.”
I move, sticking close to Bob, trying to match his every step. I’d find it fascinating were it not for the terror I feel: Bob is not ducking, weaving, diving and evading. He is just… walking — casually — across the road and through the traffic, and the traffic is just “flowing” around him.
We reach the median, which is basically a curb that miraculously succeeds in separating the opposing traffic flows. Now we’re caught between traffic coming from both directions.
Having survived traversing the first side, I feel fearfully elated. I am The Survivor. The Veteran.
I also feel the pressure of more and more people piling up on this median. Once again, it’s move or die.
Looking into the headlights of the oncoming traffic, I again fall back on my decades of American road-crossing experience. I look for an opportunity — any opportunity.
All of my senses are focused, waiting for just the right moment.
Time slows down.
In the distance, a dog barks.
Bob steps out, again surprising me into action. “No, you foo… ah what the hell,” I think and dive in after him.
The distance across the second half, like the first, is only a mere 30–40 feet (somewhere between 9 and 12 meters — or metres if you prefer). Of course, that means an effective 5–6 “layers” of traffic flowing around us. Traffic which doesn’t slow when they see pedestrians in their paths, but just continue to bob and weave unpredictably. I’ve got one eye straining to keep focused on the oncoming traffic, and the other desperately keeping a visual lock on Bob.
Bob is life.
Half way across the street I start to get this feeling like I’m just waking up and finding that I’m in the middle of doing something immensely foolish. I’m in the middle of a busy road with a tsunami of traffic sweeping toward and around me. Specifically, there is someone coming at me in a rickshaw, headlights feebly trying to blind me, horn feebly trying to warn me, and its straining motor feebly trying to toxify the already polluted air.
It’s coming fast. Collision is imminent.
There is but one reasonable course of action.
I stop.
Mistake.
A lack of situational awareness caused me to fail to notice that when Bob stepped out with me on his heels, so did the other 426 people right behind me.
Have you ever been behind one of those big dummies who get to the bottom of an escalator, step off and STOP?
Ya.
Score: Bangalore 1, Scott 2.
The reality of the situation quickly sets in: there are a lot of people behind me who have a vested interest in moving forward whether or not I do, and a lot more people in the oncoming traffic flow who have a vested interest in moving forward whether or not I do, and both fronts are probably far less concerned than I am about how rude it would be for me to use my untimely death as an excuse to get out of the “nice” dinner my colleagues are “rescuing” me to.
The threat of getting a diseased skin breach on this hygienically questionable road wakes me back to my Indian senses. Bob is already a car lane (if the lanes meant anything here) ahead of me.
I move forward again. Motorcycles loaded with extended families are swerving around me. Rickshaws peopled with angry fist-wavers are coming to jerky stops in front of the parade I’m leading. Horns are honking (more than usual). Someone behind me steps on my heel, compressing the back of my shoe, getting it stuck underneath my heel. I know better than to hop on one foot and try to fix it.
Move or die.
Finally I make it to the “safety” of the other side. Like “rescue” and “nice,” “safety” here also requires a certain interpretive flexibility. “Safety” in this case is not a sidewalk or even a field where I could escape the flow of traffic. There is a curb, then unstable piles of dirt, stone and only God knows what else, and then a fence that is obviously designed to keep pedestrians from escaping death on this busy street.
Where’s Bob?
Ah. Bob is walking along the side of the road into the flow of traffic. Not on the curb, not on the dirt. On the road.
Once again, the human shield strategy is called for. I strive to catch up, doing some fast walking and hobbling. My shoe is still not quite right but I am in the flow of many people walking along the side of the road and to stop means certain death. The oncoming traffic barely responds to this flow of pedestrians walking upstream, barely missing us by mere centimeters with handlebars, side view mirrors, rusty bumpers and odd protuberances from their vehicles.
As I catch up, I see a wonder: Bob is walking along into seemingly unavoidable death, calmly looking down at this phone, scrolling through Facebook.
He’s like Superman.
And I’m just a scared American hiding behind him trying to stay alive long enough to flee back into the familiarity and “safety” of my hotel room’s mold, mildew and attack insects.
DINNER RESIGNATIONS
The “short walk” to the restaurant involves about 10 more minutes of more death-defying street navigation. There are several back streets we use and another major street crossing which I miraculously ace this time, and finally we reach the restaurant. By this time I have lost all hope of a potential “hey guys, I’m tired and am going to head back the hotel” early dinner exodus. Not only is my confidence on finding my way back to the hotel completely shot, but the thought of trying to Frogger across traffic again without a friendly human shield is enough to resign me to a potentially endless night of small talk and social graces with no hope of escape.
As for the restaurant itself and the dinner, it was not too bad. I was too rattled from the journey to remember to take pictures or remember even what we talked about — I think just surviving the experience made me focus on the relief of being alive enough to now worry if this dinner is going to be my true demise. I do recall that it wasn’t exactly have what I would have called American food, but it was close enough: a lamb burger and just enough beer to ease the social awkwardness.
Stay tuned! Now that day one is behind me, I will be walking from the hotel to the office on my own, which will allow me to do some investigative journalism where I will expose the source of the sewage smell that plagues the hotel! I’ll give you a hint: It’s not clean.
