New Delhi: A City of Contrasts, Traffic Peril
By Michelle Krebs January 8, 2008
NEW DELHI, India -- Any auto manufacturer or auto-producing nation that discounts the emerging automotive market in India or India’s increasingly influential home-grown auto companies, which sell vehicles with names sounding more like exotic spices than cars, do so at their own peril.
And anyone who has experienced New Delhi traffic becomes an instant expert in the subject of peril.
I learned this firsthand when my simple 30-minute cab ride from the airport to my hotel turned into a fender-bender ballet of near misses and close calls.
If my taxi driver wasnât dodging overloaded trucks richly decorated in Hindu symbols â- yet strangely 
lacking any sort of side mirrors -â then he was weaving amongst swarms of wheezing three-wheeled tuk-tuks.
Add in the packs of stray dogs, wild monkeys, sacred cows, as well as the occasional bombshell crater-size pothole, and you have a cab ride that makes coping with New York City rush hour
seem like skipping through a daisy field.
A city of contrasts, where rows of BMW sedans are parked outside chic nightclubs as rag-pickers beg for a single Indian rupee only yards away, New Delhi is a microcosm of India’s past, present and future.
The 9th New Delhi Auto Expo promises to be a harbinger of a bolder, bigger and more global Indian auto industry than ever seen before.
I’ll be there from the Pragati Maidan exhibition center to explain it all –- at least as long as my taxi driver gets me there in once piece.
Photos by Nick Kurzewski and his cab driver
Nick Kurczewski is AutoObserver's correspondent based in Paris.
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Nick, you know what..we always find our method in madness.. u people should not try this as you will never find it.
When you grow old, remember this and you may be enlighten enough to understand this.
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