Thank you Traffic Volunteers!

Gurgawan my beloved city, named either after one of my most illustrious forefathers guru Dronacharya or the Jaggery that was produced here, is growing up my friends, I was driving past Galleria Market in DLF Phase 4 and was very pleasantly surprised to see volunteers at the intersection with placards urging motorists to stop behind the stopline. There were others who were helping pedestrians to cross the street.

Now those of you who live in the US or Europe or other developed countries and have never visited India, probably must be thinking that I've lost my marbles to be writing about something so commonplace.

Well guys let me try to paint a picture of how it is on Indian roads, some of my foreign friends who have been driven around our cities leave with a renewed faith in a higher power. They step out of the car after their first car ride in India with sheer terror on their faces and a prayer on their lips. The ones who are not the praying kind, refer to their experience as being inside a very scary videogame with one obstacle after another coming right at you.

The same road space is occupied by cars and yes we have loads of them; they may be signs of how well the economy is doing for some people, but to me they also mean that the city planners paid no attention to public transport. There will be open trucks overloaded till they almost overflow, tractors with trolleys carrying anything  but agricultural produce. Mini buses, shared tuktuks or autorickshaws as we call them here, motorcycles, scooters, cyclists, rickshaws which are large tricyles that ferry people. There will be pedestrians, walking on the roads because many roads in our beloved city don't have footpaths or maybe because the space is occupied by hawker stalls or dug up for some reason or the other.

On top of this tossed traffic salad, please don't expect this very western concept called traffic rules, we drive in whichever direction we feel, even on one way roads. We revel in speed and accelerate like crazy regardless of the short distance till the next traffic light. Oh yes, speaking of traffic lights, a lot of people in India are color blind, there's no other way to explain how they treat the red and green lights the same. The only lights we care about are the headlights and they will always be set on high at night, blinding anyone coming from the other direction. We could teach car manufacturers a thing or two about saving money, e.g think of how much money could be saved on turn indicator lights, we don't use them anyway!

 

Now that you have a mental picture of the traffic situation, you can appreciate what a fantastic job the volunteers were doing!

This group has been working with the traffic police to streamline the traffic flow around Galleria market in DLF phase 4 and today there are designated pick up and drop points so that cars do not wait on the narrow road around the market and clog up traffic.

Well it takes something to stand up and decide to do your bit in the middle of all the chaos. Hats off to you my friends!