A very wise friend of mine once said that whatever is true here (meaning Australia) the exact opposite of that is true in India. I observed a few interesting situations during my recent visit to India. An easy way to describe those situations would have been to say how it is here in Australia and then add: in India they follow the opposite. I will do it the hard way by describing what I observed in India. This way I may also be able to convey what I mean by opposite.
[ The Roundabout | Change of Traffic Lights | Overtaking from the Right | Advertisements on Doordarshan (TV) ]
Even experienced drivers are not clear about the traffic rules on roundabouts. In Australia, a broad principle is that before you enter the roundabout you give way to the traffic coming from your right. The traffic already in the roundabout has priority over the traffic intending to enter the roundabout. In India, they drive on the left side of the road, the same as in Australia, so you would expect the traffic to be governed by similar rules. But you would be wrong there.
In the city of Vadodara you enter a roundabout, that is if you can physically put your vehicle in the roundabout, irrespective of the traffic around you. The traffic to your right and already in the roundabout stops and gives way to you. You move on but the other traffic to your left is not obliged to give way to you. So the traffic from your left enters the roundabout and you stop in the roundabout giving way to that traffic. You wait there and in that split-second when there is a break in the traffic coming from your left you shoot forward. You go clear if you want to go straight but if you want to go right you wait your turn where the oncoming traffic is entering the roundabout. You again wait for a split-second gap to clear the roundabout.
I have tried hard to think how deadlocks are avoided and how traffic continues to move through Vadodara roundabouts. I haven't come up with an academic answer. The practical answer is there for all to see. An enormous amount of traffic flows through these roundabouts with only occasional accidents. Thinking of the Australian situation, where everyone gives way to the traffic on their right, there would still be a deadlock given the volume and diversity of vehicles in a typical roundabout in Vadodara. To drive in Vadodara one has only to learn new rules by watching and then flowing with other vehicles. It's not a major crime if you stop in the middle of the road and look at what other vehicles are doing around you to find your way. People are very patient.
I hope you now get a feel for what I mean by "opposite". It's not opposite as give way rules should be for traffic in Australia and China (Chinese drive on the right side of the road) but opposite within the same overall framework!
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There are many traffic light switching schemes in use all over the world and every city uses a combination of them to let maximum traffic through. The traffic movement I describe now can be seen at many intersections in India but I had a personal experience with it at a traffic light on BEL Road in the city of Bangalore.
The traffic light scheme at this particular intersection is such that the traffic coming from one direction is simultaneously given a green-light to turn right or left or go straight. This sequence is repeated for each direction. On the top of each traffic light a display shows the time left for the lights to change. The normal thing at these traffic lights would be for the left going traffic to wait on the left side of the road, the right turning on the right and the straight in the middle of the road. This is exactly what happens till say ten seconds before the light turns green.
As the time for the green light approaches, the oncoming lane becomes empty and (if the road doesn't have physical dividers) the traffic now spills over to the right and in the oncoming lane. The traffic has now positioned itself on both sides of the road as if it's a one way street. As the light turns green, they all shoot. Where would you expect the traffic on the wrong side of the road to go? You would expect that they would all turn right but this is Bangalore and it didn't become the IT capital doing things in the conventional way! Mind you, the traffic on the wrong side of the road cannot continue to go on the wrong side once it passes the intersection since the oncoming traffic is already piling up on the other side. So these vehicles on the wrong side shoot, as if in a race, to beat the legitimate traffic and reenter the left side of the road. Most of the vehicles on the wrong side of the road want to go straight so they race not only to beat the traffic going straight but also beat the traffic wanting to turn right.
I don't think I can convey the entire scene, which is repeated every 90 seconds or so, in words. Even if it was possible to give a description of the traffic flow, I can never describe how I felt when my auto-rickshaw suddenly jumped on the empty but wrong side of the road and raced ahead. I knew I had to go straight so this manoeuvre literally took my breath away but, miracle of all miracles, this auto-rickshaw dodged all the traffic and arrived on the left side of the road to continue its journey and think of schemes to navigate the next traffic light.
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I arrived in Mumbai on Sun 27 Nov 2005 from Canberra. It was a convenient flight but unfortunately two hours late. I had a train booking to proceed to Vadodara. The tickets were with one of my friends, Bharat Bhushan. I went to his house in Santa Cruz from the airport. His family was kind enough to offer me a great meal and then it was time to leave. It was a coincidence that our mutual friend Dipak Gupte was going to China that very evening for a consultancy task. Bhushanji had to juggle between the two. With his usual generosity he got dropped at the airport and requested his driver to take me to Borivali station and pick him up on his way back.
The driver, Mr Ganesh, was from Andhra Pradesh and he was narrating his driving experiences from all over India and mixing it all up with the traffic conditions in Mumbai. I commented that the traffic looked very heavy for a Sunday evening. He replied that Mumbai traffic is always like this and added that it is made worse by foolish drivers. As a proof he pointed to a car and said, "Look at the daring of that driver, he is even overtaking from the right." I was taken aback. I thought maybe I heard it wrong. For me, overtaking from the right is the way to overtake. This was India and the safe thing to do was to overtake from the left. For the twenty or so kilometres he drove me he religiously overtook from the left. I was then in do doubt that he did mean "right" and considered overtaking from the right to be a serious traffic hazard!
This is my experience of watching a Saturday night movie on Doordarshan (TV) in India.
The movie started at 9pm. It was a long movie. No sooner the movie started, long and frequent advertisements started to roll. I was told that the movie was a big hit hence the volume of advertising. I patiently sat through the movie and the ads, till close to midnight. I wasn't particularly impressed with the movie so I questioned how a movie like this could be a hit. My nephew replied that the real thing was yet to come and we were only near the half way mark. I said, "What do you mean? The movie has run for almost three hours, and we are close to midnight. Are you telling me that it will be 3am in the morning before the movie is over?" Then he enlightened me on the way Doordarshan does business.
Doordarshan puts a lot of advertising at the beginning. (They know that most people will stop watching later and also maybe the audience is fresh near the start of the movie.) The last part of the movie is shown virtually advertisement free. It's almost like you build your good karma by watching those ads in the beginning and then Doordarshan rewards you for it by showing an ad-free movie in the end.
The TV operators in Australia are different. They want to suck in the audience so they show an advertisement free movie for the first 15-20 minutes or so. Once you are sucked in they start rolling advertisements slowly. As the movie progresses, the time interval between advertisements reduces and their length increases. When the movie nears the end there is an ad-break every couple of minutes for what seems like at least five minute long advertisements.
Who is to say who is more clever? Both the schemes seem to work otherwise either the TV Channels here or Doordarshan would have gone out of business. Or is it that the people who watch the idiot box are really idiots and don't care either way?
23 August 2006
I just noticed a peculiar thing about how they advertise the coming episodes of Doordarshan serials. They advertise the coming episodes by showing clips from previous episodes. Elsewhere in the world they show clips from the coming episode itself to advertise it but in India it's always the opposite.
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