Life at red light

How would you react when you call up a friend and ask “how are you?” and he rep­lies, “I am stuck at the red light and definitely not having a ball.
” Oops! I almost dropped my phone. “And what on earth are you doing in a red light area?” He laughed aloud, “Welcome to Delhi, my friend.”
Just a few days old in Delhi, that was my first brush with one of the city’s many colloquials. It is actually quite funny as to how anybody can call a traffic signal a red light. But Delhites do take the word seriously and use it with impunity– be it cabbies, auto-drivers, students, doctors and even my journalist friends. Now that I have almost spent two summers in the city, I have got used to the word and though the shock factor has died down, I am yet to come to terms with the fact as to how people can so brazenly misuse a word.
Just the other day, one of my friends who had spent hours in the traffic jam at ITO was cribbing about just how difficult the city’s traffic was. I was trying to be a good listener, but in all that he said the only word that kept reverberating in my ears was ‘red light’. Unable to restrain myself, I asked, “What is red light? Why can’t you just say traffic signal?”
He stood speechless for a while and questioned back, “Why not red light?” I said there are many other lights too, in the signal…Why not orange light or green light?
He smiled, “It is simple, when you are driving and somebody calls you ….you don’t say I just crossed the orange light or the green light, you just say I am driving. It is only when you are stuck that you say that you are at the red light. It is always the red light that bothers you as it makes you wait in the heat and dust when you have an important meeting to attend.
Thus, it is the irritability factor that makes red light more conspicuous. Well, that made sense but I would rather stick to ‘traffic signal’.