Skip to main content

Excuse For Speed

If this Swiss driver did not have to pay a fine for speeding, his excuse would have warmed many a desi heart. In my town, dowager cows sat in large groups in the middle of the road.

In the peak of summer it was not unusual to have a power-outage at night. I remember being able to see the bovine island only when the headlights of the car shone into the limpid pools of their sleep heavy eyes. The remarkable thing about these animals was that they did not stir an inch no matter what was hurtling down their way. It was up to the driver to navigate around them - swishing tails, projecting horns and all.

We had an abundance of jaywalking goats too. They ignored the traffic and the blaring air horns just like the cows did. Dogs and cats were remarkably different in the sharpness of their reflexes as their survival depended on it. Unlike the cows and the goats, they were strays and more valuable dead than alive.

Driving in my town was quite a bit like going on an African safari (we did have an abundance of trees) and sightings were guaranteed. When I first arrived in this country, I had a very hard time controlling my desire to speed given the complete absence of animals on the roads. It was freedom unlike I had ever known before.

Comments

Anonymous said…
The present day equivalent of cows resting or ambling about in the middle of a busy road is the cellphone toting driver. They weave and drift over lanes, make turns without the aid of turn signals and have to be prodded to drive when the traffic lights turn green or worse do the mental one one thousand bit before you go thru a green light. Apparently to them a red light is just a suggestion to stop if they can.

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...