the yellowjackets zipping through the city – auto-rickshaws.
they are the source of my misery every morning, every evening.
half scooter, half death-trap three wheeled rickshaws are my main form of transportation. most of you probably know what they look like. but for those of you who don’t, it goes something like this: a yellow oblongular vehicle, maybe about six feet long, engine in back, a windshield up front. a thin bar separates you from the driver, and you sit on a small padded seat in the back, with no doors on either side, with the great honor of inhaling chennai’s beautifully polluted air your entire ride. the best is when you’re stuck next to a huge diesel truck (or lorry as they call it), the rusting hulk swathed in flower garlands, drunk men cursing from atop at the world below, with its fumes pouring down your throat. but back to the auto: the driver sits in front with handlebars: gear shift, break, and turn signal. but hardly anyone uses a turn signal. you just throw your hand to the wind, praying that luck is on your side, and you make the turn successfully.
oh, the other wonderful thing of having no doors (and no seatbealts) when zipping around the city, is that when it rains, water comes from above, and from below, thanks to the lorrys driving as fast as they can to make sure every auto passengers and pedestrian are soaked in leptospirosis filled puddles/lakes unable to drain, ‘backed up’ by the introduction of plastic bags to the economy.
each auto is decorated on the inside with various religious icons, usually representing all religions; i think so that if a riot breaks out between religious factions, the auto driver can’t be identified as any one religion. i’m not sure. speaking of riots, they’ve started again in gujurat, but i’ll save my thoughts on that for another time.
the back of an auto is usually adorned with various slogans: be indian buy indian, one child one family, one man one tree, india is great, and my favorite: horn, ok please. don’t ask me what that means.
of course, i can’t forget the life saver, a little red button on the handlebars that sounds the airhorn. that’s if you’re lucky. most of the times you get an auto where the driver has attached a bulb horn to the side, so he honks away, trying to ward off the onslaught of bicycles, cows, pedestrians, scooters, motorcycles, cars, lorrys and my favorite, the fishcarts. fishcarts are converted bicycles with carts attached to the back and motorcycle grade engines attached to the underside allowing them to fly at up to fifty kph – on a bicycle frame. even more of a deathtrap, and the number one cause of road fatality in chennai.
yeh-ve-low. tamil for how much (kinda sounds like how low). thir-ree-mah. (tamil for do you know. but it sounds strikingly similar to the telugu word for around and around, which is usually what auto drivers will do.) ingay engay ungay. here there where. with this armamentarium of tamil vocabulary, i confront the auto driver every morning, every evening to be fleeced again and again.
chennai is supposedly known for its exceptionally crooked auto drivers. auto drivers are usually associated with some sort of gang. a police officer might own five or six autos, he acts as a sort of “auto-pimp” demanding a certain amount of profits each day from his drivers. each auto has a meter that has some sort of set rate per fraction of kilometer, but whenever i’ve traveled “by meter” the minute the auto moves, the meter spins like a broken slot machine. tampered meters are the norm, so of course you bargain.
you bargain, but you don’t argue with a ‘rick’. drivers look out for each other, and they have the protection of the police-auto-pimp. they whisper at the dinner table of the fellow who argued over five rupees (ten cents) and three drivers cut his head off in the street, broad daylight, left him there, unable to drain, thanks to the plastic bags. these are just whispers, but needless to say, you don’t argue.
but when all’s said and done, i love my auto ride. in chennai’s stale, hot air, to speed along, open and unrestrained is exactly what you need – better than any cup of sweet syrupy madrasi coffee.
add to that that drivers don’t care the direction of traffic, and to drive head on into death is, well . . . kind of fun.
sorry i haven't updated my website in awhile. i'll be writing more often. promise. enjoy!
i’m on the shatabdi (hindi for arrow) express as i’m writing this, heading from bangalore to chennai. i was in bangalore to celebrate ganesha chaturthi – the birthday of the elephant headed god, overcomer of obstacles.
now the ridiculous of the situation: the cauvery river runs through the states of karnataka (capital: bangalore) and tamil nadu (capital: chennai). chennai, and for that matter, all of tamil nadu is in the grips of a water crisis. some of my neighbors in chennai get water for ten minutes a day. they run furiously to the tap at 7 am and fill up as many buckets as they can before their time is up.
Karnataka controls the flow of the cauvery river into Tamil Nadu. So, not surprisingly, the Karnataka government uses whatever water it needs, and then releases the left over to Tamil Nadu – far from the amount that the state needs.
the intelligentsia of india bemoan the country’s constitution, it’s inability to invest power in the executive branch, and the legislative branches ability to legislate around. but the judicial branch has essentially become the most powerful branch of government, legislating by adjudicating (sounds familiar to the united states…re: 'selection' of dubya) The supreme court ruled that Karnataka was unfairly holding the cauvery waters and had to release waters to tamil nadu.
Jayalalitha – chief minister of tamil nadu – rejoiced at her victory – but the people of Karnataka felt otherwise. A bandh has been called by the farmers – part boycott, part protest, part riots – protesting the supreme court’s decision.
a train recently traveling through Karnataka was derailed – killing sixty. product of the bandh? no one is sure. or could be verappan, the mustachioed self-proclaimed robin hood of Karnataka who is wanted by the police for kidnapping the ex-chief minister of Karnataka. some of verappan’s gang members come to the HIV clinic i’m currently working at in chennai. the other day, when one of the patients took of his shirt, his gun fell to the examining table. they say verappan has HIV also, but who knows. he hasn’t come to see us yet.
of course i’m writing this while on a train traveling through the forests that the bandh has been called in, a train has recently derailed and where verappan and his gang are hiding. wonderful.
back to ganesh. his birthday is a massive celebration with unbearably long poojas, followed by raucoucs drunken parades where people take their idols of ganesh, march towards the nearest river and ceremoniously dump ganesh into the waters.
for many the nearest waters are the cauvery. so those who call the bandh at the same time are dumping their toxicly painted ganeshas into the waters.
sometimes india just doesn’t make sense. i guess that's the fun of it all.