Soon and Very Soon

Bombings and terrorists continue to be in the back of my mind but there is not much I can do about the situation. I will remain as cautious and vigilant as I can be, but I’ve got to continue to do the work I was sent here to get done. In my off hours, I remain at the hotel because we have been advised to not venture out from the hotel all week. Although we did not get out of the hotel during the week anyway, the advisory has made us all feel restricted. We remain in good spirits but we are anxious to get home as our time for departure is approaching. We leave on Friday evening close to midnight for our 32 hour journey that ends when we touch down in San Antonio at close to 9pm on Saturday (International Date Line is crossed).

One of things I’ve learned is to have a very healthy respect for the Indian people. They are a hard-working group. The country has many poor people who work very hard to make a living. The prime example of this is the road that I take to work every day. The main road is a three-lane highway in each direction. Between the two lanes, workers are building a concrete barrier (median) separating the two flows of traffic. In the United States, this would be a process dominated by machinery. The median “blocks” would be made in a machine somewhere and brought to the destination by trucks. From there, machinery would be used to lift the blocks one at a time, and place them in the exact locations where they would be fastened to the ground and each other no doubt using another machine. This is contrast to India methods. Rather than machines, work here is dominated by human labor. The median here is being built essentially by hand. Wooden forms are built in the shape of the median. Concrete is poured in the forms. The exposed top of the forms is scraped with another board to give a semblance of a flat top of the block. Canvas coverings are placed over the forms until the concrete dries. When the required amount of time has passed for the concrete to dry, the canvas is removed and some chiseling takes place to smooth the concrete. One section at a time of about 25 yards is done each day. Many people work on each section to get it done as fast as possible. This is done by the workers even as traffic speeds all around them. There are no barricades or warnings that work is in progress. The workers are essentially working on the inside lanes of each direction of traffic. Drivers just have to be observant about the hazards of people working and material in the road. So basically each section of the median is hand-built. That’s a lot of effort. Workers don’t complain; they work long hours each day and get the job done. When one section is done, they move on to the next section.

Another observation I’ve made is the animals in the road. I mentioned earlier that dogs, cows, goats, and oxen are in the road every day. That’s a fact. What I misinterpreted was the fact that this is not an occurrence on all Indian roads. In the more downtown areas of Chennai, there is much traffic of all kinds of vehicles but there are very few animals other than dogs in the roads. In fact, you don’t see more animals in the road in downtown Chennai than you would see on any American road. My hotel and work buildings however are very far to the south of the city. The area was farmland until very recently. Then many major Information Technology companies moved in to build massive buildings to house many thousands of IT workers. At the same time, roads were being built to support the flow of traffic. The animals had always been able to go anywhere they wanted but now that freedom interferes with traffic. Nobody seems to mind this though. Since cows are sacred and since traffic continues to move along, the cows or other animals are left alone to sit or walk in herds along the main road. And that’s what I see every day. Our driver is careful to avoid hitting animals (except one – more on that in a future blog entry), and our drive to work is a non-event each day.

India is a country of over a billion people. Chennai is a city of over seven million. What I’ve been told is that the city is not any bigger in area than San Antonio. Imagine San Antonio with seven times as many people as it currently has in the same space, without any major routes through the city (410, 1604, Wurzbach Parkway, etc.), with people walking on the shoulders of the roadways because the sidewalks are very narrow if they even exist, and with all types of vehicles weaving around each other. It’s like when a concert or sporting event finishes and everybody is trying to get out of the parking lot. Vehicles are generally going in the same direction, sometimes vehicles get out of line and try to go a different direction or cut in line, and pedestrians are walking through traffic trying to get to their vehicles or to buses. That’s the Chennai I see everyday on all the roads I travel. As you can imagine, traffic does not always move very fast. Even though there are pedestrians in the road, the traffic is generally moving slowly enough that the drivers have a chance to move out the way of pedestrians (not the other way around!). At traffic lights, motorcycles squeeze through spaces between cars to try to move as close to the front of the pack as possible, and small cars do the same thing. This type of traffic would not work in the United States, but then we are not in the United States. Although traffic flow is not to our liking, we don’t have to drive here. To those who live and drive here, it is a normal way of operating and it works very well. There are very few accidents because of the constant attentiveness of the driver. Cell phones are outlawed while driving. Of course, this law is not always adhered to but the for the most part, drivers are much better here than in the United States out of sheer necessity.