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I got this in a forward from a friend…
I usually don’t like posting forwards on my Blogs…but I am making this an exception (its the first time…so sue me!!)

Excerpt from an account about a traveling experience in india:
To the uninitiated, driving in India is bedlam. It is like amusement park
“bumper cars” with horns, except we have yet to see an accident.
India is a country of many languages, and I think horn honking is a
language that drivers must master before they get a driver’s license. In
fact, it seems to be one of the more important requirements. I paid careful
attention in one of our cab rides (20 honks in 4 km), and here is a starting
glossary of horn honk meanings:
* “I am passing you!”;
* “Hey, you’re passing me!”;
* “I’m just going to drive about 1 cm from your back bumper for a while, OK?”
* “Can you please move just a little bit to the side so I can pass you by squeezing into this impossibly narrow space between your car and the oncoming motorcycles/ bicycles/ ox carts/ cows/ goats/ food vendor carts/ pedestrians/ cars/ trucks”;
* “Its a nice day and I’m just tooting for the heck of it”.
Car horns also answer other car horns with “yes” or “no” signals, although
to my untrained ear, I cannot tell the difference. Unlike North American
horns, car horns here never seem to be impolite or rude – they never say
“MOVE” or “hurry up”.
Of course, the horns could just be used out of courtesy to truck drivers.
Every truck has a hand painted sign on the back bumper saying “Horn OK
Please”, so honking at trucks may just be the polite thing to do.
My favourite thing in India traffic has to be the tunes that cars play
while they’re backing up. In North America and Europe, trucks sometimes
sound a high pitched “beep…. beep… beep” when they go in reverse. India
has turned this to an art form and applied it to cars. I am now compiling a
top 10 list of car reversing tunes. Candidates so far include “Jingle
Bells”, “Happy Birthday to you”, and some Frank Sinatra tune whose title I
don’t know because it is not “do be do be dooo”.

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Posted on June 24, 2003, in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Comments Off.

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