Your man in New Delhi reporting

[HardDrive]

I just got in. 36 hours in transit. Haven't slept in days. Karnal--> New Delhi--> Hong Kong-->Vancouver--> Seattle.

A bit of my travel log from last Monday.

Traveling from Beijing, China to New Delhi, India. This required a 3 hour stop in Hong Kong. By the time we reached India it was 3am. It’s a 80 degrees and hazy. We set off for my wifes sisters home, about 60 miles away.

India is a developing country. In many parts, it is an incredibly dirty, impoverished place. People live in trash strewn ditches amongst the rats. There is the constant roar of diesel trucks and car horns 24 hours a day. You can be plunged into this world quicker than you think......

We met my wifes nephew, Amit, and sisters at the airport. We set out on the dark, 2 lane ring road that circles Delhi. There are 7 of us and our sizeable luggage crammed into a small diesel SUV. There are no seat belts. Although exhausted, everyone is happy and joking and chatting. The roads are dark, uneven and rutted, with massive, overloaded trucks careening along. Major intersections are dark.

We start to cross a small intersection where we have the green light. Suddenly, a Vespa scooter appears in our headlight with 2 men on board. The driver mashes the brakes and swerves, but we are going at least 50mph, and its to late. My wife screams something like ‘look out!’, but we smash into them. One man is hurled forward, the other comes over the hood, and shattering the windshield with his head, before being throw about 15 feet. The scooter rockets forward in our headlights.

Everyone in the truck is fine, but my 3 year old daughter is naturally scared and crying. I jump out with her in hand, and there is total pandemonium. The people sleeping at the side of the road under rickshaws and trucks are instantly there, helping us attend to the men. There was a policeman in an SUV who heard the accident, and is there within 30 seconds.

The pandemoniums is now taken to the next level, with my nephew craming 100 rupee notes in the cops hands in an effort to get us on our way. This despite the fact that one of the men on the scooter has had his ear torn nearly off. The cop seems to be going for this, but seconds later, more cops show up, and see how serious the mens injuries are, a tell him that they can’t just let us go . There is a fair amount of blood on the dusty pavement, bright red in the headlights.

Mind you, I am standing the in the middle of a dark highway, with my crying 3 years old in my arms. The SUV is in the middle of the intersection, with no lights. The cops could care less. So I dig into the back of the SUV, and grab my back pack that has all of our passports and documents, and head for the side of the road with my daughter. And there we are, standing with the locals, who stares at us like aliens in the hazy darkness. We are getting eaten by mosquitos and rats are scurrying around in the bushes nearby. Large trucks keep trying to drive through the accident scene honking their horns to force people, police included, out of the way. A man who was sleeping under a truck asks me in Hindi if my daughter is hurt. I tell him in my broken Hindi, “Bitta tikka, tikka”, basically “child ok, ok”.

Now comes an endless debate, with various clumps of people and policeman arguing with each other, then arguing with other groups. It becomes clear the driver is in trouble. In Delhi, if there is an accident, the larger vehicle is automatically at fault. The fact that the scooter crossed a red light, with no helmets, and the fact that the two men on the scooter are stone drunk are irrelevant (yeah, nice laws).

Eventually, my nephew grabs an auto rickshaw, and disappears into the night, showing up with another SUV in minutes. We move the bags into the new truck, and we are on our way.

The post mortem? My nephew and the driver drove the men to the hospital themselves, because the police would not do it, and it could have taken over an hour for an ambulance to appear. They paid their medical bills, then went to the police station. The driver was not charged, because my nephew paid a 2000 rupee bribe (about $40) to the police to ‘mediate’ the situation. Turns out the police were perfectly willing to let us pay them off, they just wanted to make sure that every cop on the shift got a cut. To ward off the men trying to sue or files charges, they filed charges against them with the police. We arrived home around 6am, and slept, waking around noon, the previous night a hazy dream.

Sure beats Disney land for excitement…..

[alf]

Glad you and your family are fine.

I never had to bribe anyone and never tried. Growing up in Singapore, if you tried to bribe a cop/govt official he will take the money as evidence and haul your ass off to prison.

How was Beijing? Very nice weather there last weekend.