We were tooling along the highway one night in our stlyin' van, heading back to Delhi from Bawana. The traffic was particularly rough this night and our driver was doing all that he could to get us home in a decent amount of time. Up ahead, we could see that all traffic had come to a standstill due to an accident or some other possible water buffalo / wild blue ox incident. Without hesitating, our driver calmly swerved across the median and into oncoming traffic. This immediately caused some concern among the Westerners, for whom driving into oncoming traffic is usually frowned upon.
"Um, Amit?" one of us posed to our Indian handler, "We're driving on the wrong side of the road here. I mean, it'd be the right side of the road if we were in America, but really, is this a good idea?"
Without looking up, Amit coolly replied in his perfect Queen's English, "Oh, it's acceptable, perfectly acceptable given the circumstances."
I'd like to say we all breathed a sigh of relief, but the whole "driving on the wrong side of the road into crazy Indian drivers thing" kept us all awake and focused on our driver's exploits until we returned to the relative safety of the proper lane.
From there on in, "It's acceptable" would be the phrase attributed to any Indian custom that would be viewed as dangerous, or even crazy, by our prudish Western standards.
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