Slow down for the cows

From the Chinese fishing nets in Kochi to the tea plantations in Ooty, from the stunning palace in Mysuru to the tech city that is Bengaluru, we caught a glimpse of so many facets of incredible India.

What struck me then, and has stayed with me since, is the place the humble cow has in society.

The traffic everywhere is chaotic. There doesn’t seem to be any rules or regulations. From the passenger seat, it looked very much like a case of ‘he who dares, wins’. The roads are not for the timid. The roundabouts are a free-for-all. No one seems to have the right of way, and yet everyone gets to where they’re going, eventually.

Unscathed.

One day, in Munnar, I watched a cow amble down the main road against the traffic. Cars, tuk-tuks, scooters, motorbikes, trucks, buses – they all gave way. The noise was deafening. Horns honking, engines revving, and yet nothing distracted or deterred the cow, who strolled on, head high, confident in where she was going.

Slow. Predictable. Fearless.

She knew nothing would happen to her. She wouldn’t be harmed. She’d be okay.  Experience had taught her that.

Everyone else around her adapted.

In that ‘everyone else’, I saw the media, the opposition, and civil society. They slowed, or stopped, or swerved. They, the system, adapted to the power centre – the cow.

To me, the visitor, it seemed mad. Cows in traffic? Come on! They belong in fields. But to my friends, it was normal.

In my world, normal and normalisation aren’t about tradition, though.

No free press? Ah well, it is what it is.

Ignoring the rule of law? Sure, what can we do?

No checks and balances? They’ll do what they want regardless.

We’re learning to live with the situation, rather than challenge it. We’re adapting.

Not so in Minnesota. Or in Iran. Or in Serbia.

There, people are starting to question. To stand up and say, hey, wait a minute. This isn’t the way we want to go. This isn’t the country we know and love. This isn’t how we want to live our lives.

And fair play.

Resistance. Not adaptation.

Another day, in Puducherry, I sat in the car and waited for a cow to move on so that I could open the door and get out. Not for one minute did I think of rolling down the window and shooing her away.

Instead, I waited.

And I wondered.

Cows in India don’t need to rush. They’re a protected species. They have the power. They are our governments. Our elite. Our untouchables. Even questioning them seems wrong. So, we work around them instead of confronting them.

The rest of us, the traffic, we learn to be cautious, to swerve, to play the game.

It’s gobsmacking how everything works. There are no traffic lanes, no white lines. Yet everything seems choreographed to the nth degree.

Standing on an overpass one day in Bengaluru, I looked down on the traffic at a three-way intersection, trying to determine who had the right of way. There was no pattern that I could see. Cars, scooters, bikes, tuk-tuks, and buses slotted into tiny spaces as they became available. Some made their own space. It seemed like everyone trusted the other to brake in time.

And they did.

But it would only have taken one driver not to play the game, and everything would have come to a complete standstill. That’s how fragile it is.

It happened once. In Jaipur. A Mexican standoff followed by a silent, collective decision about who should break the impasse.

There’s another way to look at this, though.

Despite the chaos and the mayhem, the cows remain unharmed. They’re not knocked down or killed. Drivers brake. People walk around them. They might have to slow down to avoid a collision or wait until the cow passes to get out of their vehicle, but that collective restraint keeps the cows safe.

India’s certainly isn’t the most efficient traffic system in the world, and yes, it would arguably be better if the cows were off the roads, but efficiency isn’t everything. Tradition matters. Sanctity matters. Restraint matters.

There’s something very human in that restraint, in that willingness to protect something slow, and sacred, and oftentimes inconvenient.

History has taught us that when what is slow and sacred and inconvenient is no longer protected, things turn nasty very quickly.

With the ‘mother of all deals’ just signed between India and the EU, it’ll be interesting to see where these two mid-level powers go next. After 20 years of negotiations, perhaps both sides finally learned what the other refuses to run over…and to slow down for the cows.