In 2004 I made my first trip to India. I flew from Singapore to
Chennai. I overnighted at a decent hotel. I enjoyed an Indian meal of Tandoori
Chicken and naan. This is an unusual order because Tandoori is a north Indian
food and I was in South India. It was the only thing I knew on the menu to
order. Until this trip, the best tandoori I ever had was not in India but in
Malaysia. My family and I had a short vacation in the Cameroon highlands. It
was there that North Indian cooks had tandoori ovens right on the street.
Delicious!
Anyway, I sleep
great that night
and got up the next day to head to another city. I was a bit
worried when I got in the auto rickshaw to head to the airport. Maybe it was
intuition or maybe I was just worried about my next flight. You can decide.
About half way there, it happened. We were moving along at a decent pace and
following a petrol truck. There was traffic all around us but hey this is India
right? The driver was getting cut off by someone else and got distracted. The
petrol truck stopped. At this point, you need to imagine a slow motion film.
Imagine the driver slowly turning his head and seeing the situation. Pan the
camera to the passenger and see the horror, fear, helplessness, hopelessness, a
sickening grasp of life ending written all over his face. Imagine the driver
slamming the breaks and the passenger seeing there is no way to avoid impact
with a truck full of diesel. Eternity in heaven is upon us. Now comes the hard
part for me to explain. We are still in slow motion here but it doesn't
really help. Somehow at the last possible second the driver turns the wheel
hard. It is just enough that he doesn't hit vehicles passing on the passenger’s
side. There is a bug on the bumper of the petrol truck that has been squished
to death but it is the only thing that dies in this story. Amazingly, it all
goes down as a near miss. There is no contact with the truck at all. The
passenger looks at the driver with awe, respect, and wonder. The passenger
wonders if this man is a Hindu god worthy of worship. If you are an Indian
native, you may say that it is impossible to think of a rickshaw driver as
a god and not want to read any further. Please, bear with me. The driver has a
look of boredom. He looks relaxed, calm, uninterested, and unconcerned. He
doesn't even care! I can’t say for sure now but in my mind he yawned. The
passenger still in wonder decides this man cannot be a god and this “near miss”
must be a cultural norm.
I speak
to you in third person because it helps me tell just the facts without
excessive drama and emotion. I am reminded of this on my trip to Kasauli
because I am riding and experiencing them at a high frequency. Even within a
short time of this writing we came around a hair pin turn with a bus in our
lane coming the other way. The "near miss" is a regular occurrence in
India. Of course my contextual cultural norm of "nearness" is not the
same as others I am sure. Next time we will get back to the road to
Kasauli. I promise.
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