Readers, I ask you all to grant me one small favor: Look at your cell phones and look at your speed-dial lists (or "favorites," if you have an iPhone). Who's on the list? There's probably your parents, your house phone numbers, your girlfriend or boyfriend, some close friends and Helen's Pizza. Back home in India, and in similar countries, the contacts on speed dial would probably be the same (minus Helen's), but with one major addition: the mobile number of your driver, whom you'd call at least five times a day if you were leaving your house to go anywhere.
It's commonplace back in India to have a driver. If one looks back into literature or history, the notion of having a chauffeur is reserved solely for the moneyed elite. But that's not the case in a lot of other countries, where having a driver has nothing to do with your economic status and isn't anything unusual. For nine years, I had a driver taking me from home to school and school to home on a daily basis. It was a very simple way of getting from one place to another, where the biggest trouble I faced was asking my mother if she needed the driver — which was also commonplace.
Yet being here, as a college student, it's a totally different ballgame. Here, public transportation is used to get anywhere, be it simply using the campus shuttle, the Joey, to get to Davis Square, or taking the T to Harvard, or taking cabs when you're totally lost in Boston, or even having to contact Tufts University Police Department to take you back to your dorm late at night. It's different and equally efficient in its own way. Given that public transport is easily accessible and relatively safe, transportation isn't exactly a hassle. Take that from a guy who makes a trip to Waltham twice a week to see his girlfriend at Bentley by walking to Davis, taking the T to Porter, boarding the commuter rail until Waltham and then using a cab for the final stretch of the journey to get to Bentley.
From reading this, it may appear that I've made it seem like public transportation doesn't exist in other countries like India, which isn't true. Buses still run, and cabs can still be called — I've used my own fair share. The recent introduction of the metro system in New Delhi in the last few years has been largely successful. But in a lot of cases, this public transportation isn't what it is here — it's not safe. Granted, even here, I wouldn't expect a girl to take the subway at one in the morning and imagine that she'd feel secure, but it's a completely different story there.
It's not just during the night hours but during the day as well that parents don't feel safe having their kids traveling around the city by themselves. There have been a number of times where I've had female friends' parents only being OK with their daughters going out at night because a guy the parents are comfortable with is in the taxi with them. There's actually even a compartment in the trains for the Delhi Metro that is dedicated just to women so that they feel safe and are not subject to catcalling, eve teasing or worse.
While the trade-off between having a car and a driver and having to use public transport isn't as costly as one may have thought before coming here, largely because it's so easy to use, it's difficult to be in an underground train and still replicate the feeling of being in a car, you know, going 0 to 60 in 3.5.
