India's Car Boom

"In recent years India has embarked on a vast effort to upgrade its antiquated national highway system. The newly improved road infrastructure has uncorked a vast domestic hunger for mobility and "Indians are discovering in cars everything that Americans did: control and freedom, privacy and privilege, speed and status." "This is the American 1950's happening in India now," says one Madras resident marveling at the new ease of driving the 205 miles to Bangalore. But not everyone is happy: India's state-run rail network may have been built by the British, but it came to represent a certain egalitarianism among all classes of Indian society. Cars, in contrast, reflect the atomization that prosperity brings. This is a far bigger change for Indian society than it was for America, which in many ways was founded around the notion of the individual. Indian society has always been more about duty, or dharma, than drive, more about responsibility to others than the realization of individual desire."