Crossing the tracks

I am going to start this entry with a video:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=136011048574

(you do not need to have Facebook to see it.)

This commercial is on all the time. And is 100% based on reality. Actually, not 100%. That girl would not stop that guy. She would follow him. Or try to cut him off and get under the gate first.

There are railroad tracks separating Jangpura, my neighborhood, from Lajpat Nagar. The fastest way to Lajpat is to cross these tracks rather than going around on the Defence Colony Flyover. Well, faster if there are no trains (which seems to be rare), or if you get off your motorbike and duck under the gate, like in that commercial. Otherwise you could be sitting at the gate waiting for five 60-car trains to pass by. (That takes about an hour and a half, if you were wondering.)

The first time I was returning from shopping in Lajpat, the gate was down (I have now been to that rail crossing four times, and not once has the gate been open). I took a cycle-rickshaw because I was pretty close to home and didn’t think an auto was necessary. Unfortunately for rickshaw-wallahs, cycle-rickshaws cannot fit under the gate. My rickshaw-wallah got off the rickshaw and ran under the gate and to the other side of the tracks. I had no idea what he was doing. When he came back (yes, he crossed the tracks a second time), he told me that he found another rickshaw on the other side of the tracks and that I should cross and get in it, because the gate would be down for a while (or at least this is what I thought he said; he was speaking in Hindi and I couldn’t understand everything). At this point I could actually hear the train coming. I yelled in Hindi, “nahin! relgari aa rahi hai!” (no! a train is coming!) (Even the loud horn tooting, or whatever that train noise is, didn’t stop people from crossing.) And then the train came. It had an endless amount of cars, and then it just stopped. In the middle of the road crossing. So of course I gave up on the cycle-rickshaw and got into an auto that went around on the flyover.

Another time I was at this crossing going in the other direction, people got stuck in the middle between two trains. The train heading west, on the far side from Jangpura, was already at the road crossing with people waiting for it to pass when a train heading east, trapping the people and motorbikes and fruit carts in the middle. …and there isn’t much space there.

Oh, and the other day I saw 2 decorated camels and 2 painted elephants on the Outer Ring Road (kinda like Delhi’s version of a beltway). Not to mention the dozens of cows I see everyday, of course.

Welcome to the roads of Delhi.