Traffic Policemen and Egg-boiling

At home, you might have a near miss, go home relieved that are still alive and able to tell your family about it.  You tell your friends, only the miss by about a foot becomes a miss by inches.  In India, all the misses are near misses.  If you read The Times of India, you won’t find stories of some driver caught heading down the highway in the wrong direction.  It would be liking reading an article about Mr. Singh of Jaipur being caught red-handed boiling an egg.

The main role of the traffic policeman at busy, city intersections is to risk his life, offer himself up as a human sacrifice to the god of lost causes.  Even goat-herds ignore him.  What does he say to his wife when he goes home?  ‘Today, my dear, someone stopped.’

India - The Land of Death

Marwar – this region, because of the lack of easily available water, rather than any reference to the Indian driving style, is known as The Land of Death.

Given that, in Rajasthan, there are very few road signs, particularly at road junctions, where they would be invaluable, are tour drivers furnished with maps?

What you could do, if you have some navigational skills and it makes you feel better, is buy your own map, open it, close it, then throw it into your bag.  You might as well wait until you get home to read it for all the practical good it will do you.  Your driver may well prefer to ask about half a dozen different, random people directions to your next town or hotel.  There answers will most likely be quite contradictory.  The secret is to hope that he doesn’t ask too many people directions, not unless you’re doing some kind of survey of opinions.  If it were me, I would ask the receptionist at any big hotel, someone working in a travel agency or another taxi driver, rather than his choices: a man mending shoes, a guy with a shop selling mainly crisps, a street hawker with a load of cheap beaded necklaces and a young man who happened to be leaning on our car.  None of them knew.  I wasn't surprised.