no one follows the rules

"In India, no one follows the rules", said our driver for the day. This was the beginning of our first full day in India.

We had been dropped off the previous night at our historic hotel in Old Delhi. Another patient fellow had waited at the airport for several hours as our plane, delayed after an overnight stopover in S. Korea, had finally arrived. He was young and had a sweet, patient and kind soul. He drove us through the dimly lit streets of Delhi, hazy with smoky smog, to our old city destination. The ride was chaotic. Even at night there were cars, and buses, and pedestrians, and rickshaws, and bicycles, and stray dogs coming from every direction. But the calm soul behind the wheel took every movement in stride. He understood how to navigate the chaos of Delhi's streets. Somehow, I just trusted.

With all this chaos, I was still calm. With all the anxiety that I experienced leading up to the trip, we finally came to the point of experiencing everything unexpected, and I was completely calm. Was it my previous experiences traveling in Israel, in Palestine, in Vienna and Ukraine? Yes, maybe. The rest of the world is not as orderly as suburbian Seattle, or Upstate New York. Not by a long shot. There is something about finding calm amidst the chaos. It's liberating. Normally the smallest perturbations of peace in my life set me on waves of anxiety.

Morning came and I walked down several floors to ask about getting a driver for the day. I was waved over to a nice gentleman who was sitting in the lobby. He told me he worked with Booking.com and others to help people tour the city. We spoke for awhile, but jumped quickly into Indian and American politics. It was a fascinating and whirlwind discussion, but I was anxious to arrange for our day's trip. I brought my wife down and we met our driver. For only $30 per day, he would drive us to all the sites we wanted and wait while we soaked in the experiences. I couldn't get a half hour drive from home to the airport for that price.

I'll leave the experiences to another post, but let's address what I observed during the drive. Our driver had a pristine car. He wore an orange sweater the whole day (it got well into the 70's that day). He was clean cut and another kind, patient and caring soul. Like the younger driver the night before, he navigated the chaos with grace and a well timed honk of his horn. The melody of the horn is the music of Delhi's streets. I would imagine we'll encounter this in other cities, but suffice it to say it is the music of the symphony played out on Delhi's transit ways.

The horn can mean many things. It means I'm here, hello?, stop being stupid, I want to fit in that space, I want to turn left while you're turning right, you can't fit in that space, you're too slow because you only have legs for a motor, you're riding between the lanes, etc. It's funny, because in the pacific NW, it is politically incorrect to use the horn. I think by law we are only supposed to use it only in a life or death situation. My wife and I struggle with this because we are ex Upstate New Yorker's. You can take the New Yorker out of NY, but you can't take their horn away. It's hard for us not to honk when the guy at the new green light is looking at his phone for 200 milliseconds and hasn't hit the gas yet. We once were awakened in Jerusalem one morning at 6am by a cacophony of horns and we thought we were home. Anyway, you can understand why the horn thing makes us chuckle.

The first thing our driver for the day said was, "In India, no one follows the rules." When I heard this, I turned inward and philosophical. Back home we have rules and most people follow them. We stay in our lanes and don't run the red lights. The police actually care about the rules and enforce them. In India, there are rules that everyone ignores, but I have observed on this day that there are rules that emerge out of the chaos. After a day of travel, seeing every kind of moving obstacle try to converge on the same point in space, I have to say that Delhi has figured out it's own rules. They are not written down, but they are effective. I did not see any collisions today. No one was injured. We sought out to go to our destination, and a million honks later, we arrived. The traffic is a constantly adjusting organic flow of souls. Despite the traffic rules, they have found their own system to allow for their movement. They ignore some rules, but the body of people self organize and create their own code to move by.

This revelation on the first day still sits with me. In fact, three blog posts later, it has truly inspired me. The reluctant yogi is not too reluctant tonight. Day one of India was a success. Rules or no rules - that is the question. It seems like the answer to that question is Yes.