The Giant Pothole

We’ll be taking a short break from the Journey to the Golden Temple to bring you this important announcement…

It’s raining today, apparently not part of the monsoons, it is very unusual. The streets are a mess. We’re sitting in the office and realize at the parking lot entrance they’ve dug a small trench about a foot wide across it. Who is they? Goodness only knows. All we know is nobody’s there now and they’ve not put up any sort of warning signs at all. The far right side the trench has washed out and has become a monster rain filled pothole. Some poor guy has driven his car into that pothole and it has swallowed his left front wheel. The water disguised the hole. He’s now doing something by the wheel, we know not what. In the mean time, even though there’s enough room for two cars side by side to bypass him, the Indian drivers have decided the better course of action is to jam themselves up behind and in front of him and honk their horns in frustration.. It is a true clusterfuck out there, poor guy.

Of course nobody is going to help him, there’s no AAA, and I can’t speak the language or I would. Oh, and I’m in white pants, I only have one pair of shoes that if they get wet I’m screwed, there’s nothing but mud everywhere, and I have no way to get home to change. So as you can see, I have my excuses well thought out.

In order to ensure the worst possible outcome for things like this, the buildings in this complex are owned by private owners but the parking lot is owned by the government. So there’s no use getting mad at the government for a pothole eating your car.

I’ve come to realize that India is governed by a ‘Somebody Else’s Problem Field’. For those who’ve never read ‘Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, a Somebody Else’s Problem Field is an invisibility field almost anyone can employ. Look like a homeless person, or a slightly mentally ill person, or a general weirdo, and everybody out of embarrassment ignores you. You become invisible.

In India this field covers the entire country. A guy came out to put a licence plate on our car, all of the packaging he just left on the ground and walked away when he was finished. This is outside his own shop! The trash was somebody else’s problem. Rich people build these beautiful buildings and houses and then just dump the left over construction materials out back, it’s cheaper than having it hauled away (and to where anyway). The rubbish is now somebody else’s problem.

I tell Assim that we had similar problems in America, I still remember the trash on the sides of the road in the 60’s. Slowly over the years it has been reduced as people have become more aware and responsible. But countries like India and China are growing and industrializing so fast they haven’t had the time America had to discover the problems with pollution and trash and consumer protection, and to solve them.

Plus the older generation only sees that before they had a hut and a mule and now they have a house and a car; pollution, poisons, and safety be damned. To be blunt, they have to die and the younger generation needs to be educated in healthy living before solutions begin to take hold. It takes a generation On the other hand, India has a long tradition of Somebody Else’s Problem Field with the vast disparities of rich and poor, so who knows how long this will take.

Oh my God, they got the first car out and in the time it took me to write that, another car got stuck in the pothole with both wheels, and they’re attempting to pull it out with an ambulance. Nobody thought to put a cone out there or a pile of bricks to prevent it from happening again. Certainly the government isn’t doing anything. It’s somebody else’s problem.

We ended up leaving and one of the employees, Shika, sat and watched five more cars get stuck over then next couple of hours, and one girl on a bicycle get hurt. Those who object to people suing the government in the U.S. should see what happens when you can’t.