IST

So we’ve been making a list of top risks for a YFS intern in India. One of them is operating a vehicle on the road (only 2^nd to drinking the regular water here). This has led to a lot of interesting experiences with public transportation :)

The public bus system is the most cost efficient way to travel around here, but that doesn’t mean it’s the easiest. For some reason, sometime last week I had an especially off day for bus travel. We got to the bus stop at 9 a.m., which is rush hour, and waited for 40 minutes. In that 40 minutes, about 12 buses went by that could’ve taken us where we needed to go. Why didn’t we take them then you ask? Well basically there wasn’t enough room to jump on. There were literally people spilling out of the bus. No matter how much we pushed, we just could not get on those buses. Then when I was coming back from Ambedkar Nagar, I had to wait 30 minutes for a bus because the complete opposite happened. There were just no buses coming to the stop that I was at.

Thankfully we didn’t have an exact time to get to the office, or else we would have been in big trouble. But this is my theory on how IST developed. People here just don’t end up getting to places on time because of the unpredictability of public transportation. And now even though people have their own cars and bikes, their just so used to being late that it’s just normal to not show up on time.  Now I’m not complaining about IST, it’s just one of the many amusing realizations I’ve had here.