The Indian road 'system'.

The photo above is of a deserted Indian road.

Indians must be the world's best drivers. Infrastructure in India is impossibly outdated relative to the population; highway projects are siphons for juicy moneygrabs by local politicians and businessmen; and the Indian driver has to navigate 3000+ years of transport history: an oxcart dating from the Indus valley civilization on the left, an eight-seater gold-pained SUV ripping along on the right.

Most South Indian roads are one-and-a-half lane blacktop (which began as single lane but were then 'expanded' by a foot or so either side). No sidewalks. Inconsistent lane painting. No freeways for arterial connections. The outside zones of any roadway are reserved for pissing, shitting and the ever-present roadside shrine to some overworked diety. Just inside from this is the space for roadside vending, maimed and dying dogs and livestock, the occasional camel or elephant, half-hearted begging and child-rearing, etc. Move a little further inside the tarmac and you're into pedestrian space. This merges effortlessly (unless you're a tourist) into the space for bicycles, auto-and-peddle rickshaws, motorbikes, tractors, oxcarts, and men moving heavy things by dragging from the shoulders. Occasionally a protest and/or parade (the two are often combined for efficiency) will monopolize. Next in are automobiles, some cobbled together out of roadside waste.

Here things get interesting. The precise center of the road, around ten feet across, is reserved for buses and transport vehicles going both directions. Like choosing a lawyer or a realtor, you don't want a softie for an Indian busdriver, you want a mean-hearted, ruthless, unblinking son-of-a-bitch. The bad-motherfucker bus driver's job is to fool oncoming traffic into believing -with the core of their being- that he sincerely desires death. Longs for death. Craves it. Realize that, unlike the heathen tourist, the driver will be entirely certain of his own invincibility, having only hours before offered some stinking rotten coconut and rice to the dashboard shrine. He will also likely be chewing a largish chunk of betel nut -leaking red blood-red juices down his chin- the narcotic effects of which may prevent his heart from imploding.

Both buses (or transport trucks or all four; more is not better but certainly likely in India) will swerve towards each other at first sight, thus ensuring that whoever finally gives way will lose the maximum space and be forced to a screeching halt moments before ploughing into rickshaws, cycles, pedestrians, cattle and the like. The rippling mass of smaller (and therefore less fortunate, more expendable) road occupants will react in an expansion/contraction motion so that bus wedges into car wedges into bicycle wedges into baby wedges into tourist wedges into dying cow wedges into pissing man. All movement is fluid, intuitive. Buses will pass close enough that passengers can exchange headcolds. Two to four inches on either side will separate joy from disaster. The transience of all life will be percieved, with striking clarity, around three hundred times per hour.

The best seats in the bus are plastered right up next to the front window: the suicide seats. Why go for being dismembered and paralyzed when the honour of unrecognizability can be yours? And as a bonus the suicide seats guarantee one a view outside toward liberation instead of into the crotch, elbow, belly and tit of the 90 or so people who seem to be sitting on top of you. Joy. Now try getting out...