Driving in India Part 1 - the Bureaucracy

Driving in India is definitely an experience.  I have driven in many countries and India is by far the hardest/scariest.  Obviously, the big difference is that people drive on the left side of the road.  But that's just the beginning.  This will be a multi-part series on the ins and outs of driving in India.

Part 1:  First Taste of the Bureaucracy

Usually, when foreign diplomats show up in a country, we can just show our U.S. driver's license to the local authority and they will issue us a local driver's license.  In fact, it's usually easy than that.  Someone at the Embassy will take your license (or get a copy of it) and then come back a day or two later with your new license.  In British Columbia, we didn't have staff that did that, but it was easy enough to saunter on over to the DMV-equivalent and exchange your U.S. license for a British Columbia license (they will give it back to you when you leave).

Side Note:  DMVs are so much better in other countries.  In El Salvador I bought a second car and had to register the sale at the DMV.  Even in another language, the DMV was so much easier to navigate than any state DMV I have been to (which includes those in Florida, Texas, and Virginia).  In El Salvador, it is a private entity.  In British Columbia it is public-private partnership.  Both work well.

So in India I was hoping it would be a similar experience.  It was not.  They gave me a list of all the documents (9) I would need to procure an Indian driver's license.  This is extremely typical of Indian bureaucracy.  Nothing is easy.  Some of the 9 documents were just copies of passports, but one required a medical exam.  Fortunately we have a med clinic on the embassy compound, so I signed up, and the doctor gave me a surprisingly thorough exam far beyond the eye exam I was expecting. 

With all the documents in had, I arranged for a time to go with an embassy employee to the local DMV equivalent.  Now given I don't speak Hindi, having an embassy employee was essential.  The main takeaway from my trip was that while the office did have computers, the main storage system consisted of huge folders bound together with twine.  I have no idea how they would find anything with that system, but presumably there is a method to the madness. 

Less crowded than your typical DMV

That's my knee.

At the DMV they took my picture and my fingerprint, and the next day I got my brand new DL.  On my way baby!

Another Side Note:  Many expats living in India do not bother to get a driver's license.  Some depend entirely on Ubers (cheap!), while others hire drivers.  Many are intimidated by the traffic situation or that most of the cars here are manual transmission.  In the end, I needed to have a little autonomy and I am glad I got my license.

Numbering: Lakhs and Crores

You can get by pretty easily with English in India.  However, you might notice that they are not big fans of “thousands” and “millions.”  Instead, they refer to “lakhs” and “crores.”  The conversion is fairly simple:

1 lakh = 100,000

1 crore = 10,000,000

But you will notice that the commas in numbers appear in different places too.  For example, one lakh will be written like this:  1,00,000.  Three and a half crore like this:  3,50,00,000.  The funny thing is that if the number is less than one crore, it looks normal:  2,000.  Indeed, they do use “thousand” but whenever you might hear “Four hundred thousand” in America, it would be replaced by “Four lakh” in India. "One million" in America is "Ten lakh" in India.

Trains

People get around by trains in India.  In America, outside of metro trains in major cities, I don’t know of too many folks taking Amtrak or some other train service (is there another train service in America?) to get around.  Indian Railways is a government-run service and it is HUGE.  Apparently the railway systems in Europe, the U.S., Russia, and China are all bigger in terms of miles of track, but I’m sure India takes the cake on number of users.  Here are some impressive statistics:

Riders per year:  8.26 billion

# of passenger trains:  20,000

# of stations:  7,321

# of employees:  1.3 million (8th largest employer in the world!)

# of cattle killed by trains annually:  30,000!

And this is why I am nervous to try out trains

Water Bottles

Indians do not like to touch the lip of plastic liquid containers.  You know how you might attempt to “waterfall it” if you are sharing a water bottle?  Well, that’s what they do all the time, even if they aren’t sharing.  If it is not plastic (i.e., it is durable and expected to be used a long time) they will use it normally, but anything disposable they will not touch their lips to it.  I suppose this is a good practice in a very dirty place.  And given this is a pretty usual practice, Indians are much better than most Americans (or at least me) who usually spill half of the water when attempting this.

Sports in India

Sports in India:  Anyone who knows me knows that I have always been very interested in sports.  The sports in India have almost zero overlap with popular American sports.  The sports they love:

Cricket:  Kind of a weird form of baseball.  The scoring makes no sense.  It’s kind of like baseball, but there is no foul territory and the outs are not the same.  Our church stake did only one activity all year, and it was a large cricket tournament - rented out a stadium and everything.  This is the main sport by a large margin.

Field Hockey:  India has won eight (8) Olympic medals in field hockey.  Given that India has the lowest per capita rate of any country that has won at least one medal, this is pretty much its strongest sport.

Kabaddi:  This indigenous sport has two teams of seven players each.  One “raider” will venture onto the opposing side, tag as many players as possible without being tackled himself, all while holding his breath (??), and then return.  Also, the raider must be continually and loudly chanting “kabaddi” over and over again to show the judges he is not taking extra breaths.  This is the biggest sport you have never heard of.

India also enjoys other sports we are more familiar with.  Soccer (or “Football” as it is called here) is quite popular, as are badminton and wrestling.

The Cows

The Cows. One of the first things one notices in India is the omnipresent cow.  And really by cow I am also referring to cows, bulls, water buffalo (here they just call them buffalo), and yaks (technically, bovines, but you get the point).  Cows are everywhere.  In the streets, in the parks, on the bridges, in the fields.  Sometimes they have owners, many times they do not.  You just have to get comfortable with them being everywhere.

But Pete, why are cows just roaming the streets?

Good question.  Cows (but not bulls, water buffalo or yaks) are sacred in the Hindu religion.  So cow slaughter is mostly illegal in the country.  India actually is one of the world’s top exporters of beef, but it is primarily from buffalo.  In the past, while cow slaughter was technically illegal, enforcement was minimal, and entrepreneurs would often transport them to jurisdictions that allowed cow slaughter.

What has changed?

The current Indian government (BJP - led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi) is very proactive in pushing a pro-Hindu agenda. Many state governments, especially in the north, are also BJP.  The BJP has made it a platform position to crack down on illegal slaughterhouses and illegal transport of cows for slaughter.  Not only have states cracked down, but the rhetoric has spurred vigilante citizens to enforce the law - in dozens of cases stopping trucks with cows and subsequently lynching the “cow smugglers.”

So what is a farmer to do?

Once dairy farmers had seen the best years of their milk cows go, they would sell them in the market, usually to someone willing to transport them to slaughter.  Now they just let them go.  I’m not sure what they ever did with the bulls they didn’t use for breeding.  Water buffalo are often used as farm animals, but their days are numbered as more farms switch to tractors and machinery.  So there are a lot of animals wandering about.

Does the government do anything?

State governments subsidize many “cow shelters.”  There are literally thousands of these shelters throughout India, some housing as many as 10,000 cattle, but some as few as a couple hundred.  These cow shelters try to monetize various cow products (cow dung as manure, cow urine as elixir medicine, cow milk, etc.).  I visited one of the bigger cow shelters in Jaipur.  It was a full service cow shelter with dozens of employees.  It even had a 15-bed hospital - no, not for cows, but for people who wanted to be treated with cow products.  

Introduction

Welcome.  Many of you, either via email or when I see you in person, have asked me, “How is India?”  This is a very hard question to answer succinctly.  India is a lot of things and I have a lot of feelings about different parts.  It is a country that defies easy generalizations.  El Salvador was a small, homogeneous population of 6 million people.  Canada was more diverse, but still a relatively small population of 37 million.  The Philippines did have several distinct sub-cultures, but most of my exposure was in the north, where the culture is fairly uniform.  The Philippines was three times the population of Canada, at 105 million.  India is 1.3 billion people - with many large and distinct regions.  It’s tough to wrap your head around all the history, languages, religions, customs, and culture here.  So in this blog I plan to focus on one thing at a time that I notice is unique to India.  Or if not unique to India, at least new and interesting to me as an American living here for a few years.  Hopefully this will at least partially begin to answer the question, “How is India?”