Spit, meet baling wire

Sorry for the lack of posts lately; I've had a busy couple of weeks.

Also, I want to note that a lot of this blog will be generalizations (i.e. stereotypes) about Indian culture. It's not my intent to be racist or to make baseless generalizations. Rather, I am adjusting to a new culture, and the way to adjust to a new culture is to learn the rules of that culture--that is, how most people of that culture act in a given situation. In other words, you come up with behavioral rules that allow you to fit in better by acting the way most Indians act; I'm sharing the rules that I have come up with.

Anyway, today I'm going to write about a joke I have made a couple times with my parents, which is that a lot of India seems to be held together with duct tape. I make this joke because I frequently encounter wacky repair jobs and strange design decisions that remind me of Home Inspection Nightmares or There, I Fixed It! (take a look at both those links if you aren't familiar with them). I run into stuff like this in the US as well, but creative repairs seem to be more common here, perhaps because Indians are more likely to repair something than throw it out. Since I'm new here, I'm also hyper-sensitive to things that aren't as I expect them to be, so maybe I'm also surprised by some things that I wouldn't think twice about if I had grown up here.

Some examples, both funny, and not-so-funny:

• 
  This is a voltage stabilizer. It's a device that keeps anything hooked up to it from being fried by the power fluctuations here (I would argue that decentralizing the task of creating steady power is itself a kludge). I now have one of these hooked up to my laptop after the power adapter got fried (twice in two weeks. Yay warranties). This one, however, is connected to our air conditioner, and it did a great job--until one day it belched a cloud of black smoke out the back and caught on fire. As you can see, it hasn't been replaced. The landlord got his handyman (who appears to be a 15-year-old kid) to open it up and repair it by cutting off the burnt parts of the internal wiring, and splicing everything back together. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with doing that, so long as you do it right.

• 
  This, however, is a picture of what happened to the previous splicing job my landlord did. Good thing our curtains are apparently flame-retardant. I really hope this isn't how they fixed the voltage stabilizer.

• When I was signing up for internet, the sales representative asked for a copy of our rental agreement. I had been told he would ask that, so I had already had a copy made. He looked at it and said "This needs to be notarized." I hadn't known that, so I apologized, and told him I didn't have a notarized copy. He said "Okay, no problem," and proceeded to sign me up for internet anyway.

• My bathroom has a sliding door which, when opened, is in front of the light switch for the bathroom light. You must remember to turn on the light in the bathroom before opening the door, otherwise you have to close the door, turn on the light, and open the door again. That same switch plate also has an extra switch that does nothing. In fact, most rooms have at least one or two extra light switches that aren't hooked up to anything. The ones that are hooked up to things have to be labeled with what they control, because they all look identical and there is no consistent method of ordering them.

• My bathroom also has a hole in the wall that, when the proper combination of valves is turned, shoots a stream of water in the direction of the sink. This is in addition to the shower head. I have no idea what anyone would ever use that stream of water for.

• There are no street addresses like I'm used to; neighborhoods are divided into blocks, and each house on a block is given a number. Individual buildings are numbered sequentially within a block, but there doesn't seem to be any system for how blocks are arranged within a neighborhood (other than that they are adjacent to one another). It's basically impossible to find a building in a given neighborhood without knowing where its block is; you have to stop and ask for directions every couple hundred feet. I received a piece of mail for a previous tenant today; one of the lines of the address was "Near Eros Cinema," which is a nearby landmark. How crazy is it that someone felt it was necessary to give the post office landmarks so that they could find a house? Here's a map of my neighborhood--see if you can figure out the system.

I don't want to give the impression that I dislike India because of these things or think it's backward; most of the weird quirks I've encountered have been harmless (except the ones that threatened to set me on fire), and as the links I provided show, stuff like this can be found anywhere. I find quirky things amusing wherever I see them, so this is just to pass along a few that I found especially interesting.

Traffic

Traffic

Many of you have probably seen this video or something like it.

That video definitely wasn't shot in Delhi--the rickshaws here are green with yellow canopies, not the other way around. Traffic in Delhi (at least, in south Delhi) never gets quite as crazy as in that video, for a couple reasons. First, there's a lot more traffic here, so there isn't enough space to do the kind of shenanigans in the video, and traffic doesn't move as quickly. Second, Delhi has stop lights, and people obey them (more or less). An intersection like that in Delhi would definitely have a stop light.

Other than those differences, however, that's a pretty accurate portrayal of Indian traffic; to a Western eye, it looks like total chaos, with everyone fighting to get to their destination as fast as possible. In truth...well, in truth it's still pretty chaotic. Driving on the left is more of a suggestion than a rule, and lane markers might as well not exist. However, there is a code of conduct, and people do actually get upset if you violate the code, so it's not totally lawless. Here are a few of the rules that I've noticed; you can re-watch the video above to see if you agree.

The first rule, however, is something you can't really understand from the video because the sound is soft, and that's the use of the horn. Everyone is constantly communicating with their horns--every time you pass another vehicle, you give a toot of your horn so that they know not to pull to one side. Most large vehicles, like trucks and buses, actually have "Horn please" written on the back fender to remind you to follow this rule. This is basically the exact reverse of the Western rule to check your blind spot before changing lanes; in Delhi, the rule is to notify someone if you're in their blind spot.

The second rule is a little harder to state clearly, but the basic idea is that you're entitled to any space on the road that you can get to without making someone else come screeching to a halt. That is, it's perfectly okay to drive out in front of oncoming traffic and force them to stop, but only if they're far enough away that they won't have to swerve into a lamppost (or more likely, another vehicle) to avoid hitting you. The other side of this rule is that if someone cuts in front of you, you have to stop, and in fact, people are willing to do that, for the most part.

The third rule isn't really a rule, but more of a property of the system. The distribution of motorcycles, rickshaws, cars, and trucks/buses is such that traffic jams tend to be self-regulating. This is because the motorcycles can squeeze into small gaps in traffic, forcing oncoming traffic to stop, which gives space for the cars and rickshaws to move in, which then creates space for the big trucks and buses (of which there are relatively few).

As an example, if you watch the video again, you'll notice that there's a pretty significant jam near around 1:30. In the West, if there was a steady enough stream of traffic and a yield sign, the poor driver with the yield sign would never get to take his turn. In India, it's different--watch what happens as traffic piles up behind the stream of cars turning right. Eventually, the motorcycle riders get impatient and start to edge their way forward (one of them almost gets hit by a white car who broke rule #2). They force the turning cars downward bit by bit, until eventually they pass the barrier, and no one else can turn. Then the traffic heading straight from top to bottom gets to go, until enough motorcyclists pile up in the right turn lane to start the process all over again.

So that's Indian traffic; it's pretty crazy, but it's not totally insane. Just don't try it while talking on your cell phone.

First Post from India

Yep, I'm in India! I'm spending the summer in New Delhi, India, interning with the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. I've been here a little over a week, and now that I have internet access and a functioning computer, I'm going to be blogging about my adjustment to a new and different society.

I'm not really going to chronicle what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis, because for the most part, I'm doing the same things here as I would be doing if I were living in the States or many other countries: going to work, hanging out with friends, grocery shopping, etc. The interesting part (at least to me) is not exactly what I'm doing, but the differences in how those things are done here, as opposed to the US.

I'll be posting some photos here, but every photo I take will eventually end up on my flickr page, so check there to see what I've been seeing. There may be some lag between me writing about a topic and actually having pictures to go along with the story. This is primarily because digital cameras aren't very common (at least where I live), so a good way to draw attention to yourself (and receive a 50% price increase from the street vendors) is to start snapping photos. I'll probably start taking a lot more photos within the next couple weeks, but for now, every day seems to bring a new surprise, so I don't want a camera getting in my way as I learn to negotiate Indian society. For now, enjoy a poorly-composed shot of a tree and, well, mostly a tree.

Breaking: Car hits 7-Eleven at Clybourn and Southport

I made a quick run to the grocery store this morning, and got a little entertainment on the way back.
I'm pretty sure I passed that car on the way to the grocery store. I'm assuming everyone was okay because there were no ambulances and the police were just standing around.

Also, from the bike rack outside the grocery store, bike lock FAIL:

Poor ducks

I always feel bad for the ducks who land in the law school's zero-depth fountain. They clearly think it's a regular pond, because they invariably sit down when they land, as if they're expecting to float. When they instead discover that they're scraping their butts on the granite, they stand up, shake their tail feathers a few times, and then stand dejectedly in the fountain for a few minutes, as if looking for indications that deeper water is nearby. It never is, and they always fly off, disappointed, after a few minutes.

More, please

I love it when journalists get it so very, very right: The Great Ethanol Scam

FedEx Can Ship Anything!

Even whales.