When I was a corporator, my office was on the other side of the hill and it took me over an hour to get there. Because of the small lanes and roads in Aizawl, we have traffic jams. But we know that just by honking at people, we’re not going to get there any faster. So, we wait for our turn. We grew up with this etiquette - we just know how to wait. We also have the habit of leaving home an hour or two early, just to make room for the traffic.
I used to go to Guwahati [Assam] often as a corporator, and I remember hearing a lot of honking. It was so loud sometimes they almost gave me a heart attack. There are horns meant for big vehicles, such as trucks and tempos, but over there, I felt even the smaller vehicles, like autorickshaws and bikes, had installed these big horns. It doesn’t make sense. A horn is supposed to warn you about someone’s approach or call attention to some hazard. But they used it so much that we didn’t know where to look: back or front, right or left.
I don’t drive. When I get into a vehicle with a driver and we’re in a rush, if he wants to bypass the vehicles in front by honking, I tell him no, be polite to them - it could be an elderly person, and honking might shock them. This is not restricted to the traffic alone. We [as a people] don’t rush things or put pressure on others by trying to hurry them along. When we go to a store or to an office, we patiently wait for our turn. Sometimes, that’s a disadvantage because we often get late! (Seling, a small town not far from Aizawl, has a unique practice of ‘shops without shopkeepers’, where, operating on the principle of trust, money is collected in a safe deposit box outside the shop).
