Never Mind the Bullocks

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Authors: Vanessa Able
behind a foldedhandkerchief. ‘It is not appropriate for me to drive this Nano. It is seen as a poor man’s car.’
    His road
aukaat
firmly established, my red-headed friend returned to the superior fold of his Maruti and left me standing, shamed and bewildered, in his dust.
    â€˜The mentality of a stratified society is very much in evidence in everyday life,’ wrote Varma. 16 I presumed he was writing about India’s hierarchical caste system, which had been around for millennia and was still very much in force. I went on to read that the phenomenon of
aukaat
, which roughly translates as ‘status’, adds another dimension to Indian society’s complex layering. As I watched the doctor pull out of the petrol station, I wondered whether his attitude was representative of the upwardly mobile middle class as a whole. Who wants to be seen driving the cheapest car on the market if you’re trying to show yourself as being on the up? The Nano had proved popular with the kids of the established upper-middle class who loved its quirky design and were buying it as an addition to the existing family fleet of Beemers and Audis. But for families just entering the world of purchasing power, was it really an attractive idea to spend their precious savings on a car with unwarranted long-term prospects? And all practical considerations aside, there was also the bottom line so eloquently expressed by my civil servant friend: Who wants to be seen driving a poor man’s car? I certainly didn’t mind, but I was from another world.
    As we pulled back onto the highway, a triad of menacing black SUVs whizzed past us in a dust cloud that left me giddy from the Doppler effect. Abhilasha shimmied slightly to the left in their wake. I sighed: two
aukaat
-fuelled drubbings in the space of five minutes. The Nano might be one of India’s new industrial darlings, but when it came to the pecking order of the road, she had to take her place among the hierarchy that was dictated by one simple rule: size.
    If a person has to be asked what their
aukaat
is, the question is already an insult. Varma’s cautionary pointer might be perplexing if applied to social situations by a foreigner and an outsider like myself, but when I looked at his principle through the prism of highway etiquette, it was a no-brainer. On the roads it was clear who was boss: bulk and velocity ruled. If the oncoming vehicle was bigger than me, I relented; if it was smaller, I cut it up. It was that easy.
    At the top of the highway power pyramid were the lumbering lorries, the articulated kind that measured about ten times the length of the Nano and moved at a majestic snail’s pace, scattering all terrified objects from their path with their formidable horns that could probably be heard from space.
    On the next rung down were the smaller trucks, coaches and buses. They did have a slight speed advantage over the giant lorries in that they were often driven by boy racers who handled their bulky, aging torsos as though they were featherweight Ferraris with spruced-up horns designed to present a more intimidating impression. Trucks and buses were followed by SUVs and cars, which contained many of their own subcategories, but it goes without saying that the humble low-cost Nano pretty much bookended the spectrum with the likes of a Porsche Cayenne Turbo at the other extreme (the one-lakh car versus the one-crore 17 car). Within that hundredfold price difference lay all the other Tatas, Toyotas, Mahindras and Marutis.
    The next category mostly comprised a more domesticated class of machinery. The horse- and bullock-drawn carts, charming and bucolic in appearance, were straightforward farmyard transport modes that were delightfully quaint and environmentally friendly, their only downside being their speed of bullock-miles per hour. Other members of this category included
jugaads
, vehicles reconstructed from the debris and spare parts harvested

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