Google Maps Still Doesn’t Understand the Way Indians Give Directions

A while ago, I was trying to find a place in a part of Pune I didn’t know particularly well. Google Maps said I was two minutes away. This was encouraging. Two minutes later, I was standing in a narrow lane staring at a blue dot that was absolutely convinced I had arrived. I had not arrived.

So I did what people in India have been doing long before phones started telling us where to turn. I asked someone. “Bhaiya, this place?” He looked at the address for approximately half a second. “Go straight. There’s a Ganpati mandir. Take the left after that. You’ll see a medical shop. Not that lane — the next one. Ask there.”

Perfect. No road name. No building number. No postcode. Technically, barely an address. And somehow, significantly more useful than Google Maps.

I reached the temple, took the left and found the medical shop. Then, because the instructions had specifically told me to, I asked another person. “Oh yes, behind this building.” Found it.

The funny thing is that this isn’t really a failure of Google Maps. It’s two completely different ways of understanding a place. Maps understand cities through coordinates, road names and numbered buildings. People understand them through memory.

The tea stall that’s been on the corner forever. The temple everyone knows. The bank that closed three years ago but is somehow still used as a landmark. The enormous tree. The school gate. The shop owned by someone’s uncle. And my personal favourite: “Where the old petrol pump used to be.” A landmark that literally no longer exists. Completely useless to an outsider. Perfectly understandable to half the neighbourhood.

There’s something strangely nice about that. We’re building cities where almost everything can be delivered to a pin. Food finds us. Cabs find us. Groceries find us. A person we’ve never met can travel across the city and arrive outside our building because two phones agreed on a pair of coordinates.

But sometimes the last hundred metres still belong to the people who actually live there. The map gets you close. Then you ask the security guard. He asks the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper points at a lane. Someone on a scooter overhears the conversation and gives you completely different directions. And somehow, eventually, you arrive.

Maybe Google Maps knows where the road is. But the people living on it know where you mean.

And in India, those are not always the same thing.