A Zebra Crossing is called so not because any Zebras are crossing, but because the lines on the road look like the patterns on a Zebra….

And they are painted on the road, on the traffic lights so that people can walk on them when the light is red for traffic and they have to cross the road…

Now picture this…

The light is red…
There is a STOP LINE as well just next to the Zebra Crossing…
AND…

All the vehicles have stopped at the STOP LINE… none of them seem to be in a hurry… they are calm and waiting for the light to turn green… the pedestrians are walking across… and even after 30 seconds, the vehicles which includes some taxies, some two wheelers, a bus and a few rickshaws, are still there behind the stop line… just the way they stopped some half a minute back…

This was the scene in Kolkata on most of the traffic lights I crossed in Saturday and Sunday… Hats off to this behavior…

Sunday evening… back in Delhi… do I even need to tell you how the scene was…?

A big change was the attitude of the driver of the cab… while my cabbies in Kolkata were courteous and humble all the time… this guy did not know how to talk to customers…

Come a red light… and no one even probably knows that there is a STOP line… and they keep moving an inch ahead every second… and as soon as the red light turns green… they move like a bullet out of a gun… not bothering about anyone in front… God Save the pedestrians…

There used to be a no-tolerance zone on the road connecting Pragati Maidan to Mandi House Round-about… and I saw a lot of people behaving there… dunno what happened to it.. or the other no-tolerance zones in the city… do you know of any such zones in Delhi?

I am not saying that the traffic in Kolkata is any better then in Delhi… but the basic ethics of the road, at least how to behave on Traffic Lights is something that Delhi can learn from Kolkata…