Things I Love About India

Cow count: 2153

Things I love about India:

Cities here - at least, the ones that I've visited - are built around trees rather than over them. In my experience, in the US, new developments are characterized almost inevitably by all the baby saplings that the developers have planted to replace the trees they plowed over when they built new things. US streets, when lined by trees, are lined by trees which are strategically placed, regularly spaced, and invariably younger than the street they line. Trees here are old and gnarled and sporadic, and usually have old asphalt splashed on their roots because they've been there much longer than that new-fangled road has.

Traffic. Traffic here has been more insanely exciting than I could have imagined. And the fact that you drive on the left doesn't even register on the list of insanities:

• When people usually describe crazy foreign traffic, they use the example of cars driving on sidewalks. Well, that wouldn't really work here, because curbs are about 18 inches high and so clogged with vendors and debris that any invading automobile would be more mauled than mauling in that attack. Also, as previously mentioned, there tend to be trees along the edges of the streets, so if anything it's the curb-dwellers who infringe on the territory of the two- and four-wheelers, spilling out into the spaces close to and between trees.
  
• But people make up for the lack of on-curb-driving by observing NO spatial restrictions on the rest of the road. I've only seen lines painted on a handful of roads here, but all of those were ignored. On roads with two-directional traffic, it's perfectly acceptable to drive on the 'wrong' side of the road - as long as you don't pick a fight with a bus or cow or bicyclist. The only medians which people pretend to obey are ones over 12 inches in height, and even then cars will nonchalantly drive over to the right-hand side if there's a break in the barrier and a 2-foot gap between oncoming traffic and the median they just crossed.
• I just said "don't pick a fight with a bus or cow or bicyclist" because, on the urban streets of Chennai, there are ample opportunities to pick fights with all three. That's right. Cows, dogs, goats, people, motorcycles, bicycles, buses, rickshaws and their myriad spin offs, autos... the prevailing mentality seems to be that all of the above have an equal right to be on the road, they just have unequal abilities to fight for that right. So don't pick a fight.

India is (to steal a gimmick from the government) !ncredibly COLORFUL! All of the colors I just used in that incredibly fun-to-format sentence are more prevalent in everyday clothing than any of the tame, pale, dark colors prevalent in American clothing. Very few grays, browns, tans, whites, blacks, and pastels. Okay, fine, so the professionals wear white shirts probably half the time, but we just had a meeting today with a project coordinator for an international NGO whose purple shirt was by no means unusual. Even the cows have bright blue horns! Flower sellers are everywhere, stacking and stringing heaps of magenta roses and aromatic jasmine between fruit vendors' mounds of vivid green and orange coconuts and mangoes. These fantastic trees called "the jungle is on fire," which have the most vivaciously crumpled red flowers I could imagine, sporadically carpet both street and sky in scarlet blossoms... I'm getting a little out of hand here, but hopefully you all get the picture.

I love Indian food. I thought I loved Indian food before I came, but that was just a childish infatuation. I didn't know the meaning of the word "love" until I tasted paratha and paneer butter masala served on a banana leaf in a small restaurant in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu, India. Beginning every day with iddly, sambar, and coconut chutney has almost made a morning person out of me. Suffice it to say, I'm going to be incredibly bored with North American cuisine when I return to that part of the world. But, with any luck, I'll develop a thorough rapport with the local Asian market.