Thursday 12 Feb 2004
5:30pm
sitting here in my posh hotel room overlooking a lake in the suburbs of powai, and having only been really “out” on the town 2 or 3 times, i can’t say that i have experienced enough of india to too say much new. but i’ve some impressions. the weather is beautiful here, although the air is dirty and there’s dust all around. the traffic, however, is something else. lanes don’t really exist here. the larger roads are divided with small cement dividers so opposing cars don’t find themselves in unhappy meetings, while smaller roads are free for alls, with cars and rickshaws squeezing past each other in an effort to get to where they’re going. horns are beep-beeping incessantly as vehicles announce their presence before squeaking past another driver. i wonder if these people are better drivers because they have to constantly pay attention to the cars around them, and maneuver appropriately. because, through all the chaos, there is a certain logic of its own, like red blood cells flowing past each other through the artery of a man who’s done the atkins diet all wrong — smoothly through the clear parts but unevenly through the clogged parts. this lack of clear and linear organization almost feels organic.
i think that’s a pretty safe way to describe a lot of things I see here: organic. people are in a strange natural state here, living in the dirt and the dust and the green vegetation of this city by the sea. there is cement everywhere, but it is all surrounded by palm trees and fern-like fronds and shiny leafed trees that manage to hardily stand up to the strange elements in the air, their branches laboriously twisting upwards through the thick miasma of human industrial living. and in a way, i’ve fallen in love with this town — it is clear by the way people live that the people believe they live with the elements rather than in spite of them…
pictures soon to come. i forgot the charger for my digicam at home so no pics to upload just yet. but here’s a pic from my webcam of the view out our hotel window.
driving around in india is an interesting if not outright terrifying experience. though i have to say, people there are really good a mentally calculating rate*time=distance. they will swerve into the opposite “lane” and know exactly how fast to go to squeeze their car in ahead of a truck but still avoid hitting oncoming traffic by a split second. i actually have a piece of video i filmed in mumbai where traffic was respecting the authority of the traffic signal. green light was moving, red light was stopped. i was astounded.