These interlinked experiences find a key point of articulation in the concept of mobility. This is particularly true for techies, who travel abroad and across India in greater numbers and with less difficulty than previous generations change jobs more frequently and easily than previous generations earn and consume more than previous generations and move about an ever-expanding city more effortlessly than previous generations. The shifting urbanscape of Cyberabad is a field on which changing experiences of space and time play out. In so doing, I enter an anthropological conversation regarding the often fraught relationships between, on the one hand, planners and developers who shape spaces using a modernist model of top-down planning and, on the other, the people who come to reside in these spaces and who remake them materially and conceptually through their day-to-day activities. In this dissertation, based on eighteen months of ethnographic field research in and around Cyberabad, I consider the transformed and transforming lives of these techies. And a new, relatively affluent class of infotech workers-known locally as “techies”-has arrived from across India to dwell amidst the built expressions of the visions of planners, developers, and information technology corporations. The centerpiece of this effort has been the western periphery of the city, aspirationally christened “Cyberabad.” The area has since been rapidly transformed, and its villages, farms, and wildlands have been swiftly inundated by a tide of urbanization. Their eyes glimmering with a high-tech future, the leaders of the South Indian metropolis of Hyderabad have spent the last two decades launching it onto the globalizing stage. We conclude that looking at specific cases where social context has affected transportation, like slugging, could provide useful insights on the impact of social context on transportation policies and systems. This paper details how the region’s mass transportation policies and urban culture have combined to result in an institutionalized practice with particular norms and logics of behavior. Drawing on the work of sociologist Anthony Giddens, as well as the sociological insights of Georg Simmel and Stanley Milgram, we suggest that the practice of slugging highlights the processes of institutionalization and structuration. Slugging emerged in response to the establishment of Virginia’s High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes in the early 1970s, as single drivers picked up riders alongside the road (slugs) in order to meet the requirements for driving in the less congested HOV lanes. This paper explores the social practice of slugging, an informal system of carpooling in the Washington, DC area. Despite considerable interest in the role of social interactions and social context on transportation, there have been very few attempts to explore specific cases of social interaction influencing transportation systems.
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