The trip between Delhi and Agra 14 January 2013

This trip started 7:30 a.m. from the Radisson hotel in Delhi to Agra. It was one of the most surrealistic experiences I ever had. Imagine driving in India with 80-90 km/h with heavy traffic and a visibility of sometimes not more than 20 metres. A 5 hours long permanent adrenalin shot. Sara would have loved it. Sara is our post-doc in fusion plasma physics, who loves getting an adrenalin shot and she is a champion of driving go-kart.

The surrealistic experience cannot be described. Neither captured on photo or video, although I tried. But it can never be like the live experience. Try it if you can, you will never regret. Of course you can book the trip but you cannot book the fog. One must have luck too.

The Indian way of driving with seamless ease while having only a couple of centimetres to the other cars on the right and the left. The indescribable intuitive sense of avoiding collision when another car or bike comes across or decides to make a u-turn, even if it often feels as if it was too late. But it never is. People trying to cross the road, seemingly not worrying about the traffic, which duly flows around them. Catching up with small trucks and tuk-tuks, with 4-5 people sitting on the back side platform, their legs hanging out. Sometimes standing on some rail at the rear of the tuk-tuk. Passing by motorbikes and mopeds, the driver being flanked by a kid in front and the wife at the back, holding a few months old baby in her arms. Sometimes passing them so close that the car nearly touches the people sitting on the motorbike. Cars emerging from the fog only a few meters ahead. The driver immediately pulls to the right (remember, there is left hand drive traffic in India), and he can always trust that whoever comes behind will anticipate such a move and will brake. Bikes, cars and lorries regularly popping up by driving towards us, on the wrong side of the road. Not even a shadow of irritation on the face of the other drivers. Men walking on the roadside in kaftans, turbans, women in veils and saris. Women, carrying a big jar on their heads. Passing by slum areas, huge city dumps. Animals on the roadside, dogs, but mostly holy cows. It is cold in the morning in the Delhi area, especially in the fog, so the cows are dressed up in various textile covers. Small trucks and tuk-tuks, carrying the most unthinkable type of load, such as a whole mountain of cotton, so that they look like big balloons from the distance. Even rickshaws and bikes with a huge load, or a big ladder or beam mounted perpendicularly, sticking out several metres on both sides.

The driver was one of the big assets of the trip. Shikha told me to ask the travel agent for a “mature” driver who would not take risks while driving me between the destinations. Shikha just got her PhD at the University of Michigan, the best nuclear engineering university in the US, with distinction. She gave me many invaluable pieces of advice. I thought I understood what she meant when she said it, but I also thought she was overcautious. Nevertheless, I asked the travel agent who assured me that they only have responsible drivers. I realized on the spot that I did not really get what Shikha meant. Driving in India is not like driving in other places. I sat on a moped in Hanoi with a girl who was hoping to sell me more than just driving me on her moped around the Hoan Kiem lake, but our business interests did not match. I was just curious of the traffic, which seemed to be very hectic also there. On the moped I realized that it was only hectic from the outside, “in the lab system”. Within the traffic, in the “CM system”, it was nearly serene. Low pace, everyone going with the same low speed, lanes kept, and mostly mopeds and no cars. It felt much safer than driving anywhere else.

But in India it is different. The speed is always the maximum that the traffic allows. And this is what my driver, Sudama, did too. We passed by most other cars on the way and it could have seemed from the outside that he was taking risks. However, I felt from the first second that he was a master of driving. In a way everyone in India is a master with European standards, but he was a master with Indian standards. It was part of the adrenalin kick. I did not have any reason to be nervous, only excited. I trusted him just as much as people trust in “Hangover” or “Shootout” in Liseberg in Göteborg and can afford getting an adrenalin kick without being anxious.

The most fascinating part, and this is where the “vocational disease” of being a physicist sets in, was to see the permanent rearrangement of the topology of the traffic. There are no painted lanes, but the number of cars driving parallel to each other gives a number of lanes. This is however a random number in time. Soon there comes some disturbance, like the road becomes narrower, the traffic catches up with a lorry which is wider than the other cars, which have therefor to intrude to other “lanes” etc. Not so seldom it is another car or tuk-tuk which is in the middle of the road in a right angle with the traffic, just trying to cross our traffic. The traffic has to flow around the obstacle. What happens is like a dislocation appearing in a crystal – two rows of atoms need to become one, or rather three has to reduce to two, four to three etc. Cars trying to cut in ahead of us both from the left and the right. Our car tries to manoeuvre out one or the other, by pulling to right or left. In the end someone has to give up and give way. This never happens before the distance between the cars, tuk-tuks, bikes, or even people trying to cross the road, becomes less than two centimetres. The flow is transformed, one flow line disappears. When the road widens or the wide vehicle is bypassed, a new lane can be formed again. The way it happens is also unpredictable. It is a result of a sophisticated many-body interaction in which all drivers observe and analyse the moves of all other drivers. The Indian traffic system must the largest collective phenomenon in physics.

And then the permanent usage of the horn. In many parts of the world it disappeared, in most places it is simply forbidden. In India it is a necessity, it is life-saving. It is an essential part of the few centimetres precision of the coordination of the vehicles. On the back of each and every truck and lorry the phrase is painted “Horn OK please”. They beg you to honk. They want to save your life and their truck. Fair enough.

Now we approach Agra, the fog broke up, the sun comes out. The magic of the unreal speedy driving in the milky fog is broken, but the magic of the Indian traffic remains. I just wonder, how come that India has no F1 world champion yet? I know the answer. It is not money. A single Indian F1 driver could not count on that the other drivers are just as superb and co-operating than themselves. And then the whole thing would not work.