Mumbai Taxi

Traffic in Mumbai, like baseball, is a game of inches. If you don't like baseball, the metaphor still works - as it seems to go on forever and the rules are bewildering.

My first impression of Mumbai taxi drivers was that they were trying to kill me. Then I decided that the safest place around a Bombay taxi was actually inside it. But as we realized - I think Rachel was the first to point it out - the rules of the road, to abuse a phrase, actually seem to work. What would seem in many other places - even New York - like psychopathic road behavior seems to work perfectly well in Mumbai; everyone slows down or veers out of the way at the last possible moment with no ill will on either side, and nobody's actually getting killed (I'm sure the statistics disagree, but the point is they can't be as bad as the situation looks at first glance).

Rachel and I both felt as though we spent half our time in the city seeing it from the back of a cab - but it was actually sort of enjoyable. Mumbai's taxis are 40 year old Fiats stripped of nonessentials like seatbelts and often painted up and decaled with pictures of Ganesh or tigers or whatever else. Watching the city go by from the back seat is pretty fascinating, offering glimpses of a place you begin to understand has many more layers than you can even start to peel back in a few days' time.