Man From Matunga

Last Sat­ur­day, I was walk­ing from The Clar­idges to Lodi Gar­dens in Delhi, at the start of an early morn­ing run. I reached a sig­nal. It was red. Four cars were wait­ing at the sig­nal, behind the white line. I stopped, not sure when they would break the red. They how­ever kept still. It sud­denly dawned on me that they were actu­ally going to wait till the light turned green. Still a lit­tle unsure, I finally crossed the road and then waited at the other end to see what would hap­pen. The cars waited for another 20 odd sec­onds for the sig­nal to turn green and then drove off.

There is no sig­nal or area or place in Mum­bai where at 5.30 in the morn­ing, any car would stop at any red light. There is no per­son I know, includ­ing myself, who would stop at 5.30 in the morn­ing at a red sig­nal. No place, no person.

And this was Delhi. A city of sup­posed brutes and ill-mannered peo­ple, who appar­ently have no con­cept of how to drive, who hog the roads and at the slight­est provo­ca­tion kill each other in fits of road rage.

I was curi­ous. I won­dered whether there were stealth cam­eras at that sig­nal that the dri­vers were afraid of, like the ones that have been put up on the road to the new T3 ter­mi­nal. Or as another Mum­bai friend of mine remarked, since this is the toni­est part of Delhi where the high and mighty live, per­haps peo­ple were fol­low­ing rules out of fear of being caught.

I called a local Delhi friend of mine to under­stand. While he was not sur­prised that peo­ple had waited at a red sig­nal despite the absence of cam­eras, he was also not par­tic­u­larly impressed. Accord­ing to him, peo­ple in Delhi in the early morn­ings do stop at red sig­nals per­haps half the times, but usu­ally as part of a herd mentality…if one per­son stops, every­one will stop, unlike in Mum­bai, where all those behind will start honk­ing inces­santly and force the per­son who has stopped to break the red and move on.

The point how­ever is that half the peo­ple do actu­ally think of stop­ping that early in the morn­ing. In a good num­ber of coun­tries, it is a blan­ket rule that is fol­lowed blindly…you have to stop at a red light irre­spec­tive of the time of day.

The next morn­ing I was back in Mum­bai and we went bicy­cling on the BPT road. Not a sin­gle car cared about the sig­nals. At around 8.15 AM, I drove to San­tacruz (E). I stopped at all the red lights and twice got into fights with those behind me, who couldn’t imag­ine what kind of idiot was block­ing their “right of way”. I then took the Sealink to South Mum­bai. On Worli Seaface, at around 9.30 AM, all the cars were stop­ping at all the short and long sig­nals. This was also true all the way past Haji Ali and Ped­dar Road up to the Chow­patty junc­tion. But once I reached the Lam­ing­ton road junc­tion, it was a free for all at all the traf­fic junctions.

Is it then about upbring­ing and cul­ture? Are those liv­ing in the West­ern part of South Mum­bai more cul­tured and there­fore more prone to fol­low­ing rules? Do those liv­ing in South Delhi per­haps have more finesse? And is the rest of Mum­bai (and the coun­try), just too uncouth and rude and thus refuses to fol­low rules?

Will you ever stop at 5.30 AM in Mum­bai at a red light?