Sync

It should look out of place but it does not. Steel and rubber fashioned on an assembly line set in the heart of an humongous iron shed. Fed by the lifeblood of plants and animals lost to the forces of geology millions of year ago. Maybe that's why owners refer to them as steeds or horses or beasts. A pristine mountain stream courses by powered by unfettered nature and gravity, an engine that requires no pistons. If there were a dozen of them, the peace quotient would have taken a nosedive and their riders representative of the callousness of the human being. But one motorcycle in the midst of nature? An equitable balance.

28-Sep-2024, Benog Wildlife Sanctuary

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2024/11/sync.html]

Let the Breeze In

PC: Unsplash/Billow-926

It's impossible to find a reason to smile in remembered happiness during an article on the looming dangers of a second coronavirus outbreak. But I managed to.

"Its lead researcher, Makoto Tsubokura, said that opening windows on commuter trains can increase the ventilation by two to three times, lowering the concentration of ambient microbes." Thus spake a scientist and got me thinking.

It has been my contention that despite the heat and the dust and the stench (cruising urban slums at a slow roll) to be tackled when travelling in a Indian railway sleeper compartment, there is nothing quite like it. 

For one, the awareness that you are travelling in a thundering metallic mechanical snake and that speed is fun can only reach completeness in an express train's sleeper coach. In a scrunched general compartment, you are too uncomfortably close to someone's else's armpit and in the outer space like isolation of an AC coach, you become more understanding of why some rich people commit suicide just to break of their boredom. The sleeper class is where it is at.

There's also the demonstrably extra-social vibe that the fresh air brings in making a sleeper coach a much chattier and occasionally argumentative space. Either way, it is much better than mentally wrestling the "Are we there yet?" monsters. If the weather outside gives you a chance demonstration of a thunderstorm after a hot day in the plains, you don't even need someone to talk to. A window seat and unidentified sources of ecstatic happiness are more than enough company.

There is a lot that could be said against the sleeper coach experience - the gnawing and only partially irrational fear that you might reach your destination but your under-seat luggage might not; the office route pass-carriers whose rights to 99% of your paid-for berth you cannot dare deny; the unmentionable status of toilets within 10 minutes of the start of the journey. But that would be nit-picking.

Lonely trees, temples on distant hills, galloping bridges over nameless streams - the landscape passes you by but at a pace that you can process from a height that does not require entrusting a deep belief in God (otherwise known as a pilot). Sprinkle on some imagination and you could be riding along the train on a very fast infallible motorcycle. Turn it up a notch more and you could live entire lifetimes in those little habitations that you rumble through, never to be visited in real life but sampled, oh so beautifully, in a few seconds of track based dreaming.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2020/07/let-breeze-in.html]

A Dark Kind of Art

"Luna mein hain no tension -trumpety music-

Chalane mein hain no tension -trumpety music-

Maintenance mein no more tension"

[Luna gives you no tension, in riding and in maintenance]

That's the one. Or something like it.

This was the first advertising jingle to find permanency in my head. A very humble two-wheeler, the 50 cc moped that was the Luna even gave its rider an option of pedalling to the next petrol station with its radical in-built cycle option. Back in its day, it wasn't without its quota of cool and the fact that my older brother, 11 years my senior, commanded one was no small matter of pride. This, I need not remind you, was in pre-liberalisation, single TV channel India.

To date, I am yet to ride the Luna except as a passenger (it was sold long before I reached riding age). I have had the unhappy and possibly unique experience of being dragged by one, knees scraping along the road, for a good 10-15 metres as a bump on the road dislodged me from the pillion seat and unlike Jack of Titanic fame, I refused to let go. I have also been sent flying by one, on a routine road crossing to catch the school bus, at a tender age (early primary school) when it was still physically feasible for a Luna to send me flying as it ran into me. The central message being that there is absolutely no reason for me to look upon it fondly but even then, that jingle... it never quite left me in the three decades since.

Advertising, at its dark core, is mass mind manipulation. It is designed to stamp an impression on impressionable minds and at its most nefarious, force us to buy things that we don't need at all. Want is created where there was none, greed where there was peace.

Be that as it may, advertising is also an outlet for storytelling which tries to tap into the moods of the time. The underlying wish to push their product notwithstanding, it is difficult not to appreciate the genuine effort put into channeling the right notes. 

The fruit drink company, Paper Boat, for example, seems to have mined that rich vein of nostalgia for those of us who remember a time when long railway journeys were a family institution, and a pocket-friendly adventure rolled into one (Read aforementioned 'Luna Days'). I wouldn't waste words on why these images work. They just do, and for that generation at which these ads are targeted, any explanation is superfluous.

I, for one, am yet to buy a Paper Boat product but I think the universe is a happier place if, after all the dust from the board-room meetings, sales targets and distribution networks has settled down, a creative managed to sneak out a story and a smile for someone who isn't even a customer.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-dark-kind-of-art.html]

Jay Cee Bee!

Admit it. 

You just pretend to be angry at the jobless youth for watching a JCB at work but deep down, you are not really surprised. It's a freakin' JCB after all!

Big and yellow, clunky and seemingly purposeful. Every movement it makes is worthy of attention, like that friend who robot-dances to techno music at every party (actually, it's his only move). It's a childhood fantasy, a Transformer at the cusp of transformation, a roaring metal mountain of intent - a uniter unlike any other. To top it off, your role in helping it take centre-stage in your life ended at clicking a button.

The people's mandate must be respected! #JCBKiKhudai

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2019/05/jay-cee-bee.html]

Tawang x 2 : Sumo Singh, Road King

It only took about 10 seconds for our Sumo driver to regret his decision.

For the past 6 days, our hired driver Mr. V had been driving his Tata Sumo with the expertise needed to negotiate the treacherous roads in and around Tawang. The steep broken roads winding through mountains, which were in equal measures beautiful and deadly, requiring a combination of the Buddha and Mad Max in the driver to make it both safely and on time.

No wonder then, that I was reasonably surprised when he said “Abhi aap chalao! [Now… you’ll drive]” Though on really friendly terms with him, I did not ever ask to drive.

I joked “Ab takk aap daraa rahein the humko, abb meri baari hai. [So far it was you who were scaring us on these roads. Now it’s payback time.]”

Mr. V shrugged “Mujhe koi darr warr nahin lagtaa. [I ain’t afraid.]”.

A worried voice, one from our group of 7, chimed in “Aurr bhi chhe log hai iss gaddi mein, please yaad rakhnaa. [Please remember that there are 6 more people who don’t feel that way]”

Everywhere you look in NW Arunachal, there is a view... and a chance of falling

I did mention that I was reasonably surprised. Did I mention that I was absolutely overjoyed as well?

This, as it happened, was my second trip to Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang area. Having made my previous trip exactly one year ago, I had fallen in love with the scenic valleys, towering mountains and remoteness, which in a strange way, were actually protected from popularity by the scary nature of these very roads. Being able to drive here was an unexpected bonus!

Yes, lovely it is!

I smiled… a “is this really happening” kind of a smile and put the vehicle into gear. We headed south on our way to Bomdila from the riverside at Dirang.

Mr. I-Ain’t-Afraid lasted all of 10 seconds. Then he said “Yeh gaon mein thodaa aaraam se… yahan ke log bahut danger hai! [Take it easy… in this village. These folks are very short tempered.]”

But Mr. V… he was trapped in the third row. There was nothing he could do. This was EPIC!

I’d be lying if I said that I was fully comfortable with the vehicle.

For starters, I was struggling to find first gear and had to make do with second. This struggle, only because it was an old vehicle (I swear), may have caused some rudder shudder in my passengers. Also, the sheer size and weight of the Sumo made handling it a significantly different challenge from the dinky little Maruti 800 that I usually drive in Kolkata.

One of my "passengers" asked me to check the brakes. I replied “Haan, hain! [Yes, they exist]”. Strangely enough, not everyone found this funny.

But about 4 minutes in, the Road King symptom, as I like to call it, began to manifest. When a vehicle is significantly larger than its fellow transportation on the road, it makes its driver feel slightly pompous. “Make way”, in his mind he is thinking, “the King is coming.”

Old and shaky and beaten half to death by these rough roads, this baby was still a powerful beast. Seated like an emperor on my extra cushion, I watched, with detachment, the road ahead and charged on.

Corners? No problem, I spun the steering like a Pokeball, this way and that. Other vehicles? Chal hatt peechey [See you later]! Broken sections of the road? At least I didn’t feel any bumpiness in my driver’s seat.

It was evening and I may have driven only 4-5 kilometres of this heavenly green mountain road before Mr. V took the wheel again. The *official* reason given by him was the incoming fog which had started obscuring the road to Bomdila. When I requested feedback from our group, some of them even said “Haan! Haan! Accha chaleye! [Yes, yes, you drove well]”

But the real feedback was already received when after only those few minutes of my driving, Mr. V asked from the third row “Abb main chalau phirse? [Shall I take the wheel again?]”

Before & After

Before I could even process the question, 6 voices, none of which were mine, shouted in chorus “Haaaaan! [Yes]”. 

Outvoted 7 to 1, I had to give in to democracy.

He lived briefly but gloriously. Sumo Singh, Road King.

Road King urf Sumo Singh :P

[This is part of my blog series, Tawang x 2, on what possibly is my favourite part of India, north western Arunachal Pradesh]

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.in/2017/08/tawang-x-2-sumo-singh-road-king.html]

Pluviophile

Mild surprise. In eyes not used to seeing me leave office this early. It's only late evening. But I am compelled.

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Beyond the air-conditioned sterility and the glass walls. Down to the basement, down to the beast. There it is. Black and orange with Metzelers for shoes.

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Grumbling up the concrete, out into the world, out into the wind. The first drop hits my neck. Cold, steady and sure, a wake-up call tracing its way down my spine.

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Fumbling around in my back pocket. Need to find that token, get out the gate. The security folks won't accept anything else. Found it. License to slink away then, responsibilities in my rear view mirrors.

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Rain washed streets glint under the streetlights. In a special personal sort of way. Puddles line up on the road edges - speed sucking swamps awaiting their next victim. 

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So I follow the Buddha, hold the middle path. A couple of twists of the throttle later, vanish into nirvana.

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.in/2016/05/pluviophile.html]

Lights and dreams

Racing down the AJC Bose Road flyover on top of an open truck offers some unique opportunities.

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For example, the chance to produce some very rude noises. Using the long tube balloons freshly bought from Prinsep Ghat, looping them into a U and pinching together just right so that the rushing air in the gap produces some inappropriate soundtracks generally heard after heavy meals. Alongside the ear splitting toots of the dozen odd horns on the trucks and the thrumming of the dhaki's beats, it is a grand/hilarious way to return after our para's Kali Thakur visharjan.

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Having been volunteered, out of the blue, onto the visharjan party while I was busy chomping on a chicken roll, I had no reason to complain. Religion is not my kind of thing but festivals, especially visharjans, are a different matter. Riding, open-top, through the heart of the city, raising a ruckus for no particular reason feels like a prize which I had no part in earning. When requested, by the organizers of our neighbourhood Kali Puja to join in the goodbyes, there was no way I could refuse. Plus, I knew that there was mutton & rice to be served after.

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The city is alive this evening, the annual intersection of Diwali and Kali Puja on full display, even more so from my present mobile vantage point. Tired old houses lining Central Calcutta's roads are decked up in lighting, glittering with their original glory, despite the chipped walls and decaying doors, hidden away by the magic of this night. The teeming pedestrians, dressed to the nines, wander about under a spell of happiness, some in search of the ideal fireworks, others in the more immediate craving for some sort of tasty food. Their movements, chatter and smiles produce a happy hum, clear and distinct and impossible to mistake for anything else. 

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But for a brief moment, I take a step back - tune down the noise of the whistling rockets, gray out the showers of colours in the night skies and mute the turbulent social activity of Diwali - and something even more beautiful shines through. Something far more ancient. Something far more wise.

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It's really basic, the concept of Diwali. At its simplest, it is a diya in the dark, a message that there is no need to fear the unknown that surrounds it. For wherever it goes, the light will show the way. For however far you may be, you cannot ignore that brave little speck of hope. For no matter how cynical and practical and logical you may be, you believe in your heart of hearts that the force of peace and wisdom and goodness will eventually prevail.

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.in/2015/11/lights-and-dreams.html]

Destination driven destiny

Image via CrunchBase

I feel only one emotion towards Google and some German car manufacturers' research into self-driving cars. Hate. As someone obsessively fond of driving for hours through unknown roads, the idea of being only a passive passenger on a trip through the open road drives me bananas. When it comes to driving, I am a control freak.

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Sadly enough, I have to admit that this is an idea whose time has come. There is nothing more tragic than a death in a car accident, nothing more needless. The veteran of many a epic road-trip (often all by myself), I sorely accept that driving is mainly a mechanical task. Keep moving forward and avoid hitting anything encapsulates the basic logic of daily driving. Such cold, hard, simple logic is something a computer will always beat a human at. Always.

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In the early 20th century, when strange mechanical contraptions called automobiles first began clattering across carriage paths, I am sure they got murderous glares from men who loved riding their horses to their daily tasks. How can a nuts and bolts monster replace the emotional connection that a man has with his horse, they asked? 

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I find it distressing to think that the very next generation of humans will laugh at us, we who controlled the magic wheel of direction that took us down winding streets, using only the limited combination of our hands and heads and feet. Why did we trust our prone-to-fatigue human senses, they would wonder, when microprocessors can determine the right moves in pico-seconds every time without error?

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Basking in the bright lights of the future, the past seems odd-ball and needlessly 'inefficient'. I hear you now, Mr. Horseman, I feel your pain.

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2013/08/gps-driven-destiny.html]

Trust

"Let off the brakes!" says the instructor at certain points on the track sitting calmly in the passenger seat on my very first lap of the racetrack. The huge parking lot P10 North of the Gillette stadium had been set-up on this Saturday morning, the 16th of June 2012 into a twisting loop of 3 straights, 2 long and 1 short; a S section and 3 more turns. "Yeah right!" I think to myself "570 HP engine on a 1500 kg car with my foot on the accelerator all the way down till a second ago and you want me to stop braking? Thank you, sir but I rather like being alive." End of Lap 1.

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Lap 2 begins with a short straight and he shouts "Go! Go! Go!" I put the pedal to the metal and the God awesome roar of a 5.2 litre V-10 engine fills my universe. My head snaps back due to the sheer acceleration. I am in the driving seat of a Lamborghini Gallardo LP 570-4 Spyder Performante and it is already apparent to me why this car costs $2,50,000. For all its faults, only capitalism necessitates the building of such an excess of power or madness as some would call it and the world is a better place because of it (or so say car nuts like me). Slightly easier on the brakes this time and the car squeals just a little on the turn but holds its line, a bull on the charge.

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By the end of Lap 3, this monster under my tutelage seems to not have that much of a mind of its own. The wall of terror and worship that divided us when I first took charge of it is a lot less higher now. We pull off the track for a quick oil check as this Italian beauty in black has been put through the paces quite a few times since the day began and a little medical check-up is on the cards. All OK. "The next 3 laps will be even more fun" says my guru as he hops into the passenger seat again "I like how you use the brakes and make the turns nice and easy." A confidence boosting compliment is welcome, no matter how frequently he may have used them with his other students too. 

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Out onto the track again and gunning the engine through the straight, a slight tap on the brakes and a twist of the steering to the right. A swoop and the car is pointing right. No mishaps. Time to step on it again. Here comes the third straight, the last on this lap. 570 horses and their past generations lurch into motion and time slows down. Here comes the S curve. Should I or should I not? The speedo reads a high number, too high. I ought to slow down. This is impossible. Ever so slightly feel for the brake, tap it but then miraculously stay off it. A quick flick to the left, then to the right and then to the left again. Clean as a whistle, smooth as they come and on to the end of Lap 4.

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"How did that feel?" asks my co-passenger with a smile. There's too much to say. This is what they try to describe on all those Top Gear reviews I grew up watching. The car flows, through the curves, through the turns, at a velocity and with control almost supernatural. She is capable of far more than what my limited personal abilities will be able to put her through. The details of the next and final two laps are vague and dream like. Fast as they are, every second is a golden experience in going with the flow, following an invisible trail of driving ecstasy. The instructor's voice is not registering any more or maybe he isn't even saying anything anymore. He knows that words lose their meaning from here on in. Like in all matters of trust, the beauty lies in what remains unspoken.

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[ http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2012/06/trust.html ]

Nomad soul feed

I know it's just another ad for another commercial product and it's foolish to so enamoured by it. But come on, it's a car after all and sometimes you feel that an ad has been tapped right out of your nomad soul. So without much further ado, here's the transcript from an ad I saw and was simply blown away.

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"People don't make a list of websites they wanna see before they die...

They don't fill photo albums with pictures from an online search...

'Like being there' is not like 'being there'...

It's OK... the Internet will be just fine without you...

That's why we built the Dodge Journey...

Your search engine for the World Wide World."

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PS: Not the exact same ad that I saw on the sportsgoods store's TV but almost the same till about 0:45 into the video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESc8V1-OTGo

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2011/09/nomad-soul-feed.html]

Divine vision

The year I remember correctly was 1998. I had accompanied my dad on a work-related trip he had to make to Delhi. With his meetings for the day done, both of us were strolling around the Connaught Place shopping area taking in the sights and sounds of the hub of the capital city. Delhi, setting aside for the moment its reputation for housing the not-so-rare irrationally or criminally ill-behaved citizen, happens to be the only Indian city truly deserving of being the capital of our nation thanks both to its historical importance and the imposing architecture & infrastructure of New Delhi. 

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So there I was, a small town boy wandering through the endless rows of alluring shops and restaurants, eyes peeled for all of the details, all of 13-14 in impressionable age. It's hard to say whether it caught my eyes first or my dad's but it can be said that we reacted simultaneously, hard core car enthusiasts that we were. A board over a newly opened showroom on CP said "Hindustan Motors-Mitsubishi" and both of us moved in its direction, mice uncontrollably drawn towards the cheese (if Tom & Jerry cartoons are to be believed)

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India was still a very bad place to buy modern cars or even spot them on the road back then, and cars like the Daewoo Cielo and the Ford Escort had just arrived to add some colour to the road traffic. The richest of the rich could still afford the 200% flat import duty on BMWs and Mercedes, which were visible on the streets of Bombay and Delhi but few and far between. For the common man, the only option for a modern car was the Maruti. Any new car launch was a breath of fresh air. Both my dad and me were extremely curious.

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Stepping inside the showroom, I took a sharp breath in and let out a wolf-whistle, instinctively and unashamedly. Ask any genuine car fanatic, and he (here I am discounting any similar lunacy in the opposite gender) will tell you that cars are not cars, they are people. Every car model has a story, a character and a reputation. What I saw there was a modern day legend. The room's interiors were purposefully poorly lit and in the centre on a slowly rotating dais under a perfectly sized spotlight, stood a red as blood Mitsubishi Lancer, gleaming with intent and begging to be raced away.

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Reigning World Rally Championship champion (in its Evo avatar), the Lancer was a car that every car magazine worth its salt devoted pages to praising. How it looked, how it drove, how it stirred the soul as it roared and skid through snow, sand, gravel and tarmac; through mountains, deserts, forests and cities was all what I had been reading about dreamily uptil now. Now that dream had been physically manifested right in front of me, out of the blue, on my home turf. I desperately wanted to possess it and I wanted it to possess me. It was as strange a sensation as could be. I was in love... with a car!

'Busa fever

I couldn't believe my eyes. This was insane. This was amazing. This was unprecedented. On a pleasant August Sunday afternoon (last Sunday in fact), a Suzuki Hayabusa, the fastest road-legal motorcycle in the world as of today was slowly growling past my very own garage down the narrow lane in front of my very own house in central Calcutta. All in black, with those huge twin exhausts and the massive rear tyre, this wasn't the first 'Busa that I had seen. In fact I had seen many of them on the freeways of the USA and the occasional one in Bombay and Delhi. But describing the visual impact and contrast of seeing a motorcycle which can touch 320 kmph, inching along in my home lane, where hand-pulled rickshaws and cycle-rickshaws form the major chunk of regular traffic is beyond my current writing capabilities. My eyes followed the bike and its lucky rider till the 4 way intersection a little after my front gate, where it turned left and glided on to wherever it was headed. Luckily I had just returned from a 120 km riding adventure of my own and was still outside my house about to roll my Pulsar into my garage. On most other Sunday afternoons, I would be found fast asleep after breaking personal pledge no. 99968 of not falling asleep on a weekend aternoon. This was a clear case of divine intervention, for me to present on the road at that exact moment in time and to add another pleasant memory to my car/bike/engineering marvels obsessed life.

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Even those who are not really as big as a car/bike/engineering fan-boys like me would find the legend of Hayabusa's creation totally irresistible. It's part of modern manufacturing folklore, something you might want to tell your grandkids as a bedtime story. OK, just kidding about that part, but it's still a very cool story. Towards the late 1990s, the four Japanese motorcycle biggies namely Yamaha, Kawasaki, Honda and Suzuki were engaged in a tussle to consistently outdo each other in the top speed figures of their production (i.e road-legal) motorcycles pushing the limits of motorcycle and aerodynamic design with every new model that they launched. As the year 1999 arrived, at the top of the high speed hill was the Honda CBR1100 Super Blackbird with the speedometer capable of touching nearly 300 kmph. The Blackbird motorcycle was in turn named after the SR-71 Blackbird, an US Air Force (USAF) fighter plane which had for decades held the title of the fastest plane in the world consistently cruising at speeds above Mach 3 and had to be eventually retired because no fighter plane really needs that kind of speed under existing combat conditions. The natural world also has a bird family called blackbirds, inspiration for the plane's name but they are not really remarkable in any way except that they are found all around the world in one form or the other. The only reason the plane might have been named the Blackbird was not its record-breaking speed but probably its stealthy dark looks. Whatever logic there might have been behind the naming, the folks at the USAF and subsequently Honda were quite lazy when it came to choosing a name for their top-end machine. A point which folks at Suzuki, Honda's rival must have noted.

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The avian natural world has a very real speedster though. The peregrine falcon - with it sharp eyes, and even sharper talons is capable of reaching speeds of 200 mph (320 kmph) during a dive to catch their prey. The migratory ones fly 15500 miles (24800 km) a year from the Arctic circle to South America and back. The word 'peregrine' means wanderer and with all the bird's talents, calling it a superfast wanderer wouldn't be inappropriate. And amongst many other smaller birds that form the peregrine falcon's food, there is a certain bird called the blackbird which shares the same habitat as its predator. When the Hayabusa was launched by Suzuki in 1999, it beat the Honda Blackbird's top speed by a good 10-12 mph (16-19 kmph) reaching nearly 200 mph, thereby making it the new fastest motorcycle in the world, a challenge which Suzuki engineers had taken up very seriously and completed. Soon after that, Kawasaki tried to top that speed with the Ninja ZX-12R but failed and then for the sake of rider safety and government regulations around the world, the 4 Japanese motorcycle rivals reached an unwritten agreement that they would not try to outdo each other on the speed front any longer and concentrate on the comfort of the ride instead. Therefore, the Hayabusa has remained for a long time (frome 1999 till date) on the top of the velocity charts for a bike you can buy from a showroom and straightaway zip out onto a road. As for the name chosen by Suzuki, the Japanese kanji symbol for Hayabusa, in the language's beautiful pictographic way of depicting objects, gives a big clue (See image above) as to what it means. Look carefully and it's hard to miss the shape of a bird of prey descending on a hapless smaller bird, a graphic which can be found on the sides of all Hayabusas and is also a very popular motorbike sticker in India, without most people knowing its significance. The Japanese word for the peregrine falcon, if you haven't guessed it already, is hayabusa. Hence was born the legendary motorcycle's name - Hayabusa, the hunter of Blackbirds!

The deepest cut

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday, I saw it happen once again. I have witnessed it so many times by now that I am sure it is an inevitable tragedy for anyone who has the guts to sit at the wheels of a car in this city. It was a slow speed accident. Something about a high speed crash says that yes, you were driving rashly and quickly on a stretch of road which was not meant for it and so in a sense, you were asking for trouble. But when the traffic is moving at a snail's pace, and you are safely guiding your own vehicle through the mess one foot a minute, it is so much more heart-rending when some buffoon who is on the same slow course dings your car. 

This time it was a brand new red Tata Indica who got tagged by an oldish grey Honda City. The Indica driver was on the verge of tears and sputtering angrily at the driver of the City "I will punch you to pulp. I'll beat you black and blue. I'll smash in all your car windows!" He knew fully well that he could do none of those things with a cop standing next to him and the huge back-up of cars behind him on the narrow lane that he now blocked, honking in unison for him to make a move on. He also knew that on another day, it could've been him trying to sneak his way past another excruciatingly slow car and in a last moment error of judgement failing to come down on the brakes quick enough.

This unfortunately is the bitter reality of Calcutta's roads. The joys of owning and driving a brand new car are balanced out by the terror of getting into scrapes and head-on encounters with some wayward driver or the other. The slight ding or scratch must hurt like hell even if you are not the typical car lover. After all, the thing costs a lot of hard earned money and who doesn't like a new and shiny ride to stay that way. I have come up with a solution of my own for the time when I buy my own new car (A red Swift is high on my list of the car I have forever wanted to buy). Before venturing out on the roads to take on the incredibly horrible traffic of this city, I would request a hammer from the showroom's garage. Then I would swiftly ding my car with the aid of the hammer and drive away with the knowledge that the worst deed that can be done to a glinting, metallic beauty of my new car has already been done and at least find some consolation in the fact that I myself was to blame for it!

Mechanical poet

Long due and well deserved is what a servicing means to our 10 year old Maruti 800. The appealingly named 'moonbeam silver' colour of its body has suffered too much from the vagaries of the weather and now should more appropriately be called 'just about silver'. My Dad is a very safe driver, as safe as anyone can be, considering that even the safest driver has no control over some other madman driving on the road who might just crash into your safe driver tag and ruin it for good but even he couldn't prevent the minor dents and scratches which have appeared all over the car during its decade of existence on Indian roads. The left rear door has a gluey door lock and the the left rear door inner handle is half chewed thanks to my dog's itchy gum teeth developing phase when she was carted around to wherever my parents went. And the final fact being that my Dad is not a very big fan of company approved service stations and so our car had seen very little of the inside of the huge Maruti service station only a few kilometres from our house in Bharuch.

But carting the three of us (Mom, Dad and me) and a dog through 2300 kilometres on a east-west sojourn across India without a single major problem (only a minor coolant issue near Mehkar, MH which was resolved in a jiffy by a local mechanic) was good enough to finally earn it its equivalent of a luxury bath and even Dad couldn't protest too strongly about it. So it got the royal treatment with a carburettor overhaul, engine oil change, complete vacuuming of all the dust collected from across India and a long session in one of those wonderfully effective car showers of repair garages out of which every car no matter how old & beaten up comes bright and shiny. I was there when one of the mechanics was finishing the spruce up and I swear that if the car had a face, it would've smiled!

Smiled not just because it was fresh and clean again, but also because of the central role played by it in many a family adventure the highlights of which would have been the Bharuch to Mussoorie and back drive in 2005 and the Bharuch-Calcutta mega road trip less than a month ago apart from numerous trips to Bombay, Pune, Baroda and Surat. What after all had it not seen? The steep roads and the striking beauty of the Himalayas; the lush forested ghats with "Go slow, elephant crossing" road signs of Orissa; the flickering green fields over endless expanses all across rural India as the sun played hide and seek with some feeble monsoon clouds; the tumble and tussle of Bombay traffic and the divine glimpse of Marine Drive bordered by the Arabian Sea at 2:00 AM in the morning as it both cursed and praised the endless energy of the Maximum City; the divine stretches of roads between Udaipur to Ahmedabad, and Mumbai to Pune as India began to prove that we can make roads as good as any other nation in the world - just a random sampling of all the paths that it has merrily wandered on. Our car like the members of our family has the footloose soul of a travelling gypsy. Given a chance, it could compose one or two original songs for the road! 

Blood brother

Sunday morning was a really sticky one today as I dragged myself to Beniapukur bazaar for the bothersome necessity called food. Bazaars are very colourful places with the whole spectrum of colours encompassed by the sellers, shoppers, fruits, vegetables and the other riff-raff. When the sweat is not pouring out of your very own sweat pores like someone has installed a little pump in you and you don't look as if someone has just dunked you in a tank full of sweat, the charms of the bazaar may just work on you. But today was not such a day!

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So shopping bag in hand, I moved grim faced from vendor to vendor, usually buying stuff from the very first seller of that particular item be it tomatoes, capsicums or garlic not really bothering with what was "the best" in the market or the best priced! Not that I ever took the pains, but today there was even more incentive not to put myself through the torture. Then came a motorcycle lazily gliding through the milling crowds of people parting them down the middle like a swimmer in the pool. As the motorcycle passed me in slow motion (after all, a crowded bazaar is no place to use the accelerator), I saw a very interesting little sticker on the rear mudguard which conveyed the rider's thought process.

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The sticker said "I don't ride fast, I just fly slow".

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The weather didn't feel so hot any longer. A cool breeze of release blew through my mind as I thought of my own two wheeled ride waiting patiently inside my garage at home. And I smiled... a very evil smile!
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[Do not be foolish enough to consider everything stated above as an incentive to speed. Drive and ride safe. Reach home. Alive. With all limbs in their respective places. Let others on the road do so too. Please.]

The joker

Arjeplog is a town in northern Sweden on the Arctic circle. According to an article in Top Gear I was reading recently, 7 months in a year it remains ice and snow-bound which is why it serves as the icy terrain testing capital for car manufacturers around the world. Rolls Royce, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, Ferrari - all use the almost completely frozen lakes around Arjeplog to test their mean mechanical beasts in winter conditions. What a sight it must be to see a Ferrari, a Porsche, a Rolls Royce or a big SUV slide its way across vast stretches of endless ice, being tested at the limits of their design parameters and speed. Everyone has their own versions of heaven and I think I now have a fair idea of what mine is going to look like. Kilometres worth of frozen open space and a very fast car to race and skid across it! So used to icy conditions is this corner of the woods that even civilians can parallel park their car in one single spin. Talk about cool!

Besides putting Arjeplog on the "Must-go-places-before-I-die" list for me, reading the article re-awakened a cold fear in me. "Parallel parking" is a combination of words which never fails to cause me to gulp a couple of times before triggering sad memories of innumerable failed attempts to squeeze my car in that available spot between two available cars no matter how large the space was. 99 out of 100 times, I would turn to look around, then look through the rear view mirror and then turn around again, put my car in reverse and then find myself in a position where half of the city's traffic was stuck behind me and my car was in a position which was sure to invite a ticket from a policeman or the attention of a tow truck. I would quietly get down and ask a friend to parallel park my car for me to my great shame and accompanying sense of failure. I can drive a car for thousands of miles without fatigue because I love driving on open, empty roads but tell me to parallel park my car and the sour expression on my face will tell you what exactly I think of you.

This is why the one of the few times that I managed to parallel park correctly was amongst the greatest days of my life. It was during my road test for a Massachusetts driving license and that is a certification which made me happier than earning my engineering degree had made me such was the intense performance anxiety that overcame me. Driving license tests have a way of doing that. I had already been driving around in the USA for close to 6 months by then using my Indian driving license which was valid for a year from my arrival in Boston. But an urge to save on insurance money forced me to get my driving skills re-certified for an American license. Despite having thousands of driving miles under my belt, in India and the USA, on the day of the test, it feels like the first day at a new school. The same steering wheel, brake and accelerator all seem strangely hostile when a driving inspector is sitting next to you with a clipboard and a pen looking every bit like he was hell-bent on failing you. Clearing the road test carried no value in the office conversation amongst your friends but God forbid if you fail the road test, then the joke would be on you for years to come.

It was early in February 2009 when my chosen date for the road test arrived. It was snowing on that day as it had the day before and the roads were covered with a thin layer of freshly fallen snow while the stuff from yesterday was piled high in snow walls on both sides of the road by the snow plows. I was moving ahead with extra caution going easy on the accelerator as spinning the car with the co-passenger being the old guy in charge of evaluating my driving capabilities would surely have spelt my doom. I got sharply reprimanded by him for holding up the traffic though and so I had to step on the gas to keep him happy. I exercised extra caution and stopped well behind the line at a red light on the test route but then my invigilator gave me a look which said he wasn't too impressed with my safe attitude. Hand signals and the three point turn followed but none of them seemed to bring the remotest smile to his face. At this point of time, I was on the verge of losing it as the tension of not being able to match up to his idealistic standards was getting to me. That's when he asked me to pull up on an empty street and said the two words which were the real reason for my unrest "Parallel park!"

He added "Be careful, son. I don't want to touch the snow...". So, here I was, already taxed by the momentous responsibility of parallel parking between an ice cream van and a red Ford Taurus, even without the don't-touch-snow clause. The snow was piled 2-3 feet high on the side of the kerb such that even the kerb was not visible. The snow was to be my line of reference to put my car in position. A more picture-perfect horror scenario I couldn't have imagined for myself! My mouth ran dry and I twisted around in my seat like it was an electric chair while putting my car into reverse. I looked around, checked around in all human ways possible before turning the steering all the way in one direction and then in the other. Like magic, my car had pushed itself into position or so I thought. My driving inspector was still as silent as a rock.

I drove into the parking lot 0f 10, Washington Street where the Taunton Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV) is located. I sat quiet as a mouse as the inspector popped open the lock of his door. On his way out of the car, he leant back, that grumpy old man of the last 20 minutes smiled at me and said "Son, congratulations. You have just become eligible to drive in the State of Massachusetts!" I breathed a sigh of relief and he added with another meaningful smile, "I was never going to fail you. I give you credit for giving the test in all this snow!" It seemed that all his seriousness was a put-on act to have a little entertainment at my nervous expense. I was still too happy then to have parallel parked successfully and earned my driving wings, on the one occasion that it really mattered, to tell him aloud what was going through my mind. I was smiling too but my eyes might have leaked the words that were on the tip of my tongue "Bl***y joker!!!".