In India, a honk speaks many languages.
Each honk is a sentence, sometimes a shout, sometimes a whisper.
Sometimes a full-throated paragraph of presence.
On the streets of Delhi, Mumbai, or Jaipur, traffic doesn’t just move—it negotiates, constantly. And it negotiates in sound. The honk becomes a kind of punctuation in the flowing script of the street: commas, exclamation points, question marks.
It’s not always anger—not like in the West, where a honk often comes with a scowl. In India, it’s different.
It’s location.
It’s intention.
It’s a request.
A warning.
A courtesy.
A claim to space.
A small, sharp declaration of “I exist.”
To drive here is to listen as much as to look. Horns are woven into the rhythm of the road—a grammar of urgency, intuition, and chaos that somehow functions. Not by rules, but by sound.
Hi, I’m Colin—a travel writer and geologist who’s endlessly curious about the world and how we move through it. I write to make sense of the chaos, the beauty, and the small moments that often go unnoticed. Welcome to this little corner of my writing life—I’m glad you’re here.