Envying the Chinese Traffic Culture and Pondering Over the Lack at Home

Dear Readers

Bringing to you the third chapter of the China series. The first two being Setting Off on a Hitchcockian Voyage: China I and Ambiguities of a Journey: New Delhi to Beijing 

It requires mention at the outset that I take no authority to extrapolate my views and ideas to be the holistic, bracketed category of ‘Chinese Traffic Culture’. What follows is the most insignificant of opinions that I have culled out of my very superficial engagement with a small part of China for a short period of time.

Infrastructure-awe has remained a recurrent phenomenon in the experiences of Indians travelling to China. I too was not an exception during my brief visit to Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu this summer. Multi-layered elevated roads, a magnificent skyline, well calculated lanes and even better calculated riding on them, were all objects of awe, not because they are something beyond the world but simply because sights of similar magnitude are rare at home.

Something that engaged much of my appreciation was however not the architectural and infrastructural extravagance ubiquitous all around, but the delicate social system of acceptance that sustains the structural extravagance. The Chinese traffic culture aptly manifests the agent-structure convergence. The structural extravagance is undoubtedly magnificent but, equally convincing is the acceptance at the level of the agents. The wide roads, well maintained pavements, measured lane system etc, I am sure, would be more expenditure and less investment without appropriate internalizing of the norms of a healthy traffic culture and a sublime realization by the citizens of their sense of responsibility and duties towards ensuring the sustenance of the system.

For instance, imagine a hypothetical (home-like) situation wherein the roads around the city are well galvanized and perfectly calculated into multiple lanes. The roads are maintained with adequate safety markers (speed breakers, zebra crossings, speed limits etc) wherever necessary. But what if the riders are totally indifferent of the structural calculations? What if they randomly ride on whichever lane their car steering takes them to? What if they change the lanes at their own discretion, expecting to reach home earlier by few seconds, resulting in brain hemorrhaging honking by others? What if their motor-powered two wheelers ride over the pavement meant for pedestrians or cyclists, just because the traffic signal somewhere is red? What if they shut their eyes to the red light early in the morning or late at night because the ‘State’ is asleep and the policemen are gone? What if those white lines over the galvanized roads dividing them into different lanes were to be seen as fine art on the street by someone absolutely jobless and with endless time at disposal? 

Yes! Right you are! The ubiquity of the structural extravagance then goes down the gutter. Wide six-lane highways then are sunk costs never to be realized.

Thus I kept wondering – sometimes unconsciously while sometimes with great concern – throughout my stay in China about this curious phenomenon of acceptance and obedience. While I introspected and kept on pondering about the lack of the same back at home, I realized may be it has to do with the very nature of our nation building. Passive resistance and civil-disobedience, I recalled were two of the primary ingredients of our state formation. While being utterly phenomenal at that time as tools to stand against a foreign colonial ruler, the unfair continuance of the same in the unconscious – or may be conscious sometimes – post-colonial psyche of the later generations seems to be fatal.

Delhi Traffic.
Img http://accommodationtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Delhi-Traffic-Committee-suggests-no-more-infrastructures-in-Delhi.jpg

Our post-colonial beings unfortunately seem to be over obsessed with the founding ideals and leave no opportunity to disobey. We therefore instantaneously jump traffic signals, steer across lanes, spit and loiter around the city, pee across walled enclosures and what not. In our maddening rush for “development” and “growth” we failed to, or may be ‘refused’ to internalize the norms and the responsibilities attached with being “developed”. While we toiled day in and day out to improve our national mathematics, statistics and economics, we refused to give equal space to alternatives such as civics and morality. We, as a rights’ society obsessed with rights for better existence however failed to accord the necessary recognition to the idea of duties. It was then that I came to a conclusion that without pondering over on and working out these graver concerns, our infrastructure-awe (and resultant frustration) at a foreign land is expected to be an unfortunate and never-redeeming attachment.