On Saturday 13 Oct 2007 11:19 pm, Deepa Mohan wrote: > But why > does that make the bicycle a bad idea?
It's the physical danger. I did not do mountaineering because I was too scared. I do not do any cycling in Bangalore because mountaineering is looking more attractive. I personally do not think well meaning individuals taking up bicycles is going to change the appetite of Indians for cars. Those hungry Indians are going to hurt me on my bicycle and are not going to make it easier for me to keep breathing. By a quirk of fate I come from a family that has owned a car from long before I was born - i.e 1920s. - which is unusual in India. The "wisdom" that makes one understand that cars are a problem comes easily when one has "been there, done that". Tens of milions of Indians who can now afford a car are asking why they should be urged to give up cars when they have lived lives hearing about how America is so advanced and how everyone has a car. Stopping or discouraging car ownership goes beyond environmental sense and is like "dark forces stopping or delaying development, happiness and efficiency" Teaching Indians the environmental lessons that have been learned by the act of raping the environment in the West is not going to be easy - especially when an aware Indian realises that as an individual his environmental footprint is miniscule compared to all the countries he has been taught to admire and emulate. The fact that his compatriots add up to a lot matters little to him. He is not going to stand for being asked to suffer for someone else's idiocy. And the oh-so concerned world is not going to stop manufacturing cars is it? India is probably the only country in the world where people put up with a situation in which your average car has a 1000 cc (or smaller) engine capacity and the biggest petrol engines you can get rarely exceed 2500 cc. The fact is that you can have people transport with engine capacities of less than 1000 cc and India is sure to go further down that route. The average Indian car will have an environmental footprint that is smaller than those in other countries and this is going to make the average Indian car buyer, car maker and planner very difficult to lecture to, short of economic measures (sanctions) with their accompanying political overtones. shiv
