The first time I ever visited United States was in the year 2002, as a tourist. I was excited and nervous both and was really looking forward for my first ever –Western experience. I was travelling with my international driving license and rented a nice beautiful SUV. I was ready and in gear for my adventure to start. While coming out of the parking lot I honked couple of times, once when I was close to someone walking on the road and once at the gate of the car rental building as the driver in front of me wouldn’t just budge.
The road was empty still he wouldn’t turn onto it. As I did that, I saw some people who were walking towards the rental office stare at me. I thought maybe it was because of my skin color or maybe they just found me amusing and different. It was until two hours later when I reached the designated address defined by GPS, that I found out how wrong I was in honking at people or at other motorists on the road. As I drove unto the driveway I started honking in excitement so that my friends would run out to greet me upon my grand entrance.
To my surprise I saw them run out and instead of smiling they were yelling “Stop honking- this isn’t India! ” Driving in India is a sensory experience that one also needs apart from sight, ears too. Honking is one of the crucial and essential parts of driving there. People honk when they see their friend driving next to them, so that they acknowledge their presence. People honk when traffic is slow, or when in traffic jam. They go especially nuts if there is a cow stuck in the intersection or to get rid of pedestrians or bicyclists.
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Basically it’s a process that uses your skill of driving less but more of honking so you can get through from one place to another, as if you slow down you have been defeated, that is the normal norm the motorists follow. They say if you can drive in Italy you can drive anywhere. I would like to rephrase that by saying if you drive in India you can truly drive anywhere. After my friends explained me the norms of driving here, I realized what the looks were about that everyone was giving me each time I honked!
To me, at that point of time honking while driving was as natural as breathing. Its almost as if one hand is concentrating on the wheel, the other is busy creating a symphony. This was my first cultural misunderstanding that I ever went through. I felt the stares of people every time I thought about it for the next couple days. How what is normal in one place can be coined as indecent, rude or just plain crazy in another. This had struck me for the first time. I had learnt my lesson of not assuming and making my preset notions to be true anywhere else but -in my zone (my country).
I was lucky that no one stopped me and gave me a ticket or also the fact that I was not a victim of road rage due to my insensitivity of honking which frankly I was quite unaware of. This incident helped me understand that I need to expand and accept the new world and its new laws and culture that lay in front of me and also knowing as a fact that my driving quality had nothing to do with respect to me being a respectful driver on the roads here. Its not what you can do, rather how you do, respecting the place that matters.
