Some experiences of Indian timings

To see something different I went with one of the staff members to a nearby city to buy some things for her and the students. We went by bus and although it was only about 35km away it took us about 1 ½ hours to get there. Due to the monsoon the roads are quite bad and traffic in India is generally very chaotic and much slower than what we are used to. The average speed on a highway is probably around 70km/h for cars and a lot slower for trucks and other vehicles. Although it is supposed to be a road for fast locomotion one can find anything that moves on a highway, whether they are cars and buses, bikes, scooters or rickshaws, sometimes camel carts, bicycles, or even people and all sorts of animals. And although it seems as if there were no rules at all the system somehow works.

Of course there are certain bus times, but unfortunately they are wrong most of the time. Thus it happens that people wait for hours for one bus to come, and so did we when we wanted to go back to school. The bus came 1 ½ hours later than it was supposed to and due to this delay it was quickly overcrowded. Overcrowded (in India) means that there is absolutely no space left for another person. We had a journey of about 10 to 15 minutes when suddenly a fizzling sound could be heard. How else could it be, it happened to be a puncture and everybody had to get off the bus. There was no chance of going any further in it and thus we had no other choice than waiting for the next bus to come. It was supposed to be only half an hour later and all of us were standing and sitting at the side of the road, staring hopefully down the road. But nothing happened. One bus passed and picked up a few people but it was the wrong direction for us. Another one came by, but did not take any more passengers because it was already very full and people told us that it did also have a puncture. Nobody knew when the bus would finally come and thus we did not do anything else than sitting and standing around, getting very, very bored and tired. Some jeeps passed and would have taken a few of us, but nobody wanted to go in there because they had already paid the bus fare and a jeep was a lot more expensive and they would have had to pay that in addition.

Finally, two hours later, the long-awaited bus came and we could continue our journey. We reached school with a delay of nearly 5 hours in which we had done nothing else than waiting for a bus to come. But that is something that happens in India fairly often. In rural areas people that can afford it stand at the side of the road, waiting for a bus of jeep to come that goes in their direction. And sometimes one has to wait for several hours until the journey begins.