Hork Ok Please

There is a type of delivery truck here that's referred to as a "goods carrier" (with the English phrase used in Hindi as well). They tend to have brightly colored murals painted on them. Frequently, these murals are religious in nature. The picture above, for instance, has the famous guru and yoga practitioner Sai Baba of Shirdi painted on it. Some of the goods carriers are a lot more decked out with murals and various kitschy knick-knacks, but this happened to be the one that I had a picture of, so it's the one that you get to look at for now.



It is an unstated obligation for a goods carrier to have (in English) "Horn Ok Please" written on the back. On the first day of the trip, someone asked Arnab, who is Indian-born, why all the trucks said this, and he said that he had honestly never thought about it. I looked it up online later, and it turns out that this was to warn drivers against accidents around the time of World War II. Back then, trucks were run with kerosene engines due to gasoline shortages. These engines could explode and prove deadly at even the slightest accident, so it was encouraged that cars in the trucks' blind spots honk. Thus, the original warning was "Horn Please, On Kerosene," then shortened to "Horn Please, OK." Even though trucks arent allowed to have kerosene engines anymore, it's become part of the accepted style, and they still bear this sign.

The general anachronism of honking on the road to let other vehicles know where you are is very popular here. There are different patterns of honking that I've noticed which can variably warn someone you're coming, tell someone you're passing them, or warn someone that they are doing something wrong. As you can imagine, this means that essentially a driver is honking the horn almost the entire time he goes somewhere. Two or three times, I've hired a rickshaw where the driver periodically honked the horn while going down a straight, empty road. I'm not sure whether he thought that another car was going to materialize in front of him, or couldn't drive without the usual noise, or what. As a result of this, the sound of the traffic here is comparable to the sound of traffic in New York City, even though there are significantly fewer vehicles.