August 07, 2008
Lane Jumping in India: Highway Etiquette as Workout for Your Abs
I’m taking bets that my abs look more like those washboard midsections of tv gym equipment hucksters than they did when we started climbing to the hill stations of Kerala four hours ago.
There is a rhythm to driving in India. The driving rhythm has a danceable beat. At least that’s my working hypothesis since I have isolated no other pattern of rule-based behavior in what I have observed by sitting in the front passenger seat.
Apparently if you don’t “jump lanes,” as they call it here, on the downbeat you risk the moral equivalent of causing your dance partner to trip over his/her own feet. Generally, you dance partner is either the person playing the one-note symphony at your back bumper or the vehicle in your lane closing in on your front bumper rapidly from up ahead.
It is this Indian school of sedentary samba that has given my abdominal muscles their workout today.
We wove past city traffic in the flatland, around curves past tapioca plantations in the foothills, up through rubber and then pineapple plantations. Muscle tone was noticeably improved by the time we got to betel nut tree plantations, climbed higher past cocao seedling nurseries, coffee plantations, and finally on to terraced mountainside tea gardens.
Roots of one hundred year old tea bushes have shape d themselves to cling tenaciously to soil and rock – sometimes long after both have eroded away. I cling to the dashboard. Sometimes that’s because of the centrifigal force. Sometimes it’s to brace for what seems to be immanent impact.
I’m still not sure how they do it but the dance goes on and I’m developing a kinesthetic sense of its timing. Even so, I have never observed a dog, cow, pig, goat, car, truck, child or adult visibly respond to the horn being honked at them. Some part of this roadway dance definitely has something to do with projecting “coolness” under life threatening situations.