Learning to see

Most of the time, Andi and I look back on our pre-trip Cultural Training with a smile: during an incredibly busy time in our lives it was nice to have a “day off,” and although we did learn a few very important things, much of the training was either fluff or not yet true to our experience.

One piece of truthful fluff was the reminder that living in a new culture is really hard work, mentally and emotionally exhausting.  It is very easy to forget just how much work goes in to becoming a person, how much training it takes to become culturally literate, how hard it is to have common sense developed in us, how much educating it takes to become a functioning member of society; how much social and personal effort it takes to make all the contingent facts of our existence seem necessary.  The dis-location of living in a new culture makes all of this disciplining very apparent.  The simple task of walking down the street, for example, is exhausting; trying to remember that they drive on the “wrong” side of the road here and so also walk on the “wrong” side of the sidewalk, trying to remember that pedestrians never have the right-of-way, trying to remember and read the social hierarchies to figure out which of the other pedestrians has the right away, etc., etc.  It is all really quite exhausting. 

Part of what needs to be learned is how to see and know what one is seeing.  I am still learning to “see like an Indian,” and so my observations may not be trust-worthy, but I think I learned an amazing new law of the road today.  The coffee shop where I sometimes go to read sits on the outside edge of a six-way intersection: four one-way roads come together with two two-way roads, with a policeman’s stand situated on an island in the middle of all of this.  (The Indian Big Brother is not quite as sophisticated as its London model; here, there is an actual policeman at most intersections armed with a digital camera taking pictures of miscreants.)  It is, to say it lightly, a mess. 

The structural difficulties of a six-way intersection are amplified by the fact that stop lights here are on a roughly three minute cycle, which means that red lights at this intersection last about nine minutes.  Which is to say that there is usually an incredibly long line of cars in each lane.

What I think I learned today is that if you are on a motorcycle or scooter and you can split lanes or weave your way to the front of the line, you can hop off your bike, turn off the engine, and Frogger your way through the intersection, jumping back on your bike on the other side, heading off on your way.  Apparently, if you are walking your bike you are a pedestrian, and since either there are no jaywalking laws in India or the police don’t care about enforcing the laws that there might be, you can go anywhere you want.  If this is right, it is the most amazing loophole in traffic law that I have ever witnessed.