Yet another juvenile rant..

I'm trying to roll two rants into one here; they're vaguely connected, but I'm not sure how much sense I'll make. Anyway.. 

I recently read a book called Don't Ask Any Old Bloke for Directions. It is written by an IAS officer who quits his job and goes motorcycling across India. By all accounts, it should be a book I'd normally relate to, and that was probably why it was gifted to me on my birthday a few years back. I finally got around to reading it, and I was disappointed. There were parts of the book I could completely understand and love, but the overall balance tilted in favour of disappointment. A feeling of being let down. 

To start with, the book sets up this notion of a guy who gives up everything to go on a journey of self discovery across the country. Someone who says no to a position of power in the establishment, and goes off on that classic rebel pursuit, motorcycling nirvana. The writing is shoddy and rambling at places, but has a certain charm to it, like listening to a slightly drunk guy at a party who has very entertaining stories, but the alcohol just isn't allowing him to structure them properly. However, a third of the way into the book, I got the sense that this was all a sham. He never let go of his security net, like the initial part of the book (not to mention its marketing) claimed. It wasn't quite the I-gave-up-everything-and-stepped-into-the-abyss story it was made out to be. He owned a few restaurants that placed him comfortably on the financial front, and he could afford to let go of his government job and tear up and down the country on a motorcycle. And he hadn't quite let go of the trappings of power. And that is all fine by me. He's above forty at the time this happens, has a family, and I suppose that's not the age where one can just cut the ropes, get rid of the training wheels, and let go. Hell, I would've shivered at the thought at 21. I would've devoured the book and paid no attention to its flaws had it been a simple collection of tales from the road. What ticked me off was the whole posturing, the misleading premise, and the attempt to make it sound like a Che Guevara story from India. 

Which brings me to my second point. Che Guevara had the misfortune of making an epic trip across South America on an old Norton 500, and in the process he saw the plight of the people on his continent, his people, and underwent a metamorphosis into a kickass revolutionary dude who tried to make a difference for those people. However, what he really managed to do was capture the imagination of half of the worlds douchebags, and continues to do so today. I have huge respect for the guy, and my knowledge of him extends outside of what Motorcycle Diaries tells me. I will not go into the mechanics of how he ended up as a silhouette on headbands and underpants, but I do get royally ticked off when people start putting up Che images on their blogs and facebook pages after they've done a few hundred kilometres on a motorcycle. 

George Carlin once said,"I don't have pet peeves, I have major psychotic fucking hatreds! And it makes the world a lot easier to sort out." This is my personal equivalent of that. Right after I'd read the book I mentioned earlier in the post, I saw two acquaintances start pretending to be Che after a few hundred kilometres on their bikes. I ride a bike as well, and my love of bikes is well documented. I come from a family with a strong communist background, and my own views on life are left of centre, sometimes very much socialist. However, each time I go out touring on the bike, I do not expect to return after having overthrown a government or two. The thing is, motorcycling is fun in itself. You don't have to pretend to be a South American revolutionary to have fun on two wheels. To me, those who resort to that are missing the whole point of motorcycling. The fact is, both the IAS officer and my two friends went out to have fun, and I'm sure deep inside they realized that their revolutionary abilities wont make a pimple on Che's posterior. Yet they chose to pretend. Very, very few people have become actual revolutionaries by undertaking a motorcycle tour, and none of them have really matched the scale of Che's accomplishment. There will necessarily be very few Ches and James Deans. Statistically, that makes your chances of becoming a rebel revolutionary minuscule. Less than worthless. Statistically, it probably makes you a douche. 

Che's legacy has been defiled enough by the underpants and arm-bands, and to see bikers join that parade ticked me off. So I started my own revolution, this post on a blog with 3.8 annual readers. Yeah, that'll teach them. 

Rant over.  

Clean bike, wide grin..

She sits in the workshop in all her glory. Having been a bit of a hangar queen lately, she seems intent on testing my patience. I think she has a smirk on her face. I remind myself to be a bit less silly, this was a bike after all. Whatever was causing her to throw her little hissy fits, we had to get to the bottom of it and fix it, lest she throws a tantrum en route to Goa. A night ride is on the cards, and a possibility of the bike throwing tantrums on NH4 might not sit well with my mental well being on the ride. I think back and remember that she's not really let me down on a long ride as yet, but as she (and I) are getting long in the tooth, I tend to anticipate issues more often these days. Thus, we're back at the workshop, where she takes centre-stage.

Syed the Reliable, coaxes and cajoles her into revealing what the vexing issue was. She's not easy on us, we have to check and eliminate electrical and fuel line issues before she finally reveals what was wrong. A tiny unreachable sleeve connecting carburettor to engine has given up the ghost. For all of 150 rupees, Syed the Reliable will have to dispatch a minion halfway across town to get a spare. The broken sleeve meant she was taking in an impure fuel-air mixture, which caused power and mileage to drop, temperatures (both hers and mine) to increase, and more importantly, stoppages. I would be doing 100+ on the ring road and for no reason, she would go on strike. And then when I'm on the verge of giving up and calling Syed for help, she would start up again, as if nothing was ever wrong. Sounds a bit like a marriage, I suppose. I wouldn't know. I leave her in the care of Syed and his minions, and walk the short remaining distance to work.

At five fifteen in the evening, I walk back in and see she's getting a wash. Syed has been uncharacteristically tardy, but that's okay, I have all the time in the world. They roll her out of the washing bay, oil up the chain, put on new handlebar grips to replace the old ones I'd lost in the last accident, and she's good to go. She's set me back two hundred and eighty eight rupees, but that's nothing compared to the relief of finally having fixed everything. A thousand couldn't fix her the last time I was here. I thank Syed and Co. one last time, and walk out of the shop, where they have her ready and purring, dripping wet from the wash. From the sound of the engine I figure everything's okay, it's an oddly reassuring sound. I get on, check everything, switch the purr to a muffled roar, and we're off. I watch the water droplets slide and fly off her sides as we pick up speed. I made it a point to ask them not to dry her after the wash. There is only one proper way to dry a freshly washed bike. And that is to RIDE it.

:)

Two wheeled ramblings..

So, the other day, someone sort of told me i'm a good driver. It was a friend of a friend whom i was not previously acquainted with, and apparently my friend had contrasted our driving styles and told him that i am a good driver. i was understandably miffed that my friend didn't convey this piece of valuable opinion directly to me, but i suppose there were reasons behind that. obviously, my head would grow heavy from the praise, to the effect that it would hideously upset my center of gravity when cornering, and that is decidedly not a good thing. of course, i didn't start writing this as an exercise in self-effacing humour, i had other reasons. reasons like the fact that i have probably received maybe five or six compliments on my driving ever since i've been legally allowed to drive.

to put things in perspective, my mom was once so terrified sitting behind me on her 50cc two stroke moped(that had a speedometer that maxed at 60kmph) that she actually jumped off it when she thought i was going to crash it. she preferred scrapes and bruises from the road to broken limbs from the lamp-post i was heading too close to. to this day she does not believe my explanation that i was avoiding a speed bump adjacent to the lamp-post, and that i was in control of the vehicle the entire time. she has never ridden pillion on a two wheeler that had me on the front seat ever since then, and this is a true story. those of you fortunate enough to have met amma would know for a fact that i can't possibly make up stuff like this. when i got my bike four years ago, people who used to ride with me used to employ words like lunatic, batshit insane etc, to describe my style of driving. several people had sworn never to get on my bike again, and there was one case where a friend's boyfriend had specifically forbidden her from ever getting on a bike being ridden by me. each time i try telling someone that i think my driving is pretty okay, they invariably point out my accident record, which stands at 28 accidents if you count the minor bumps and spills as well, and my claim of being at least a halfway decent driver would end there. so, to be introduced to a total stranger as a man with good driving manners, was a surprise to say the least.

So, all this brings me to lunacy. I recently turned [classified number], and well, since birthdays usually remind you of how old you're getting, i did a bit of introspection. i always used to believe that the lunacy you have when you're a kid sort of evaporates away with age, and is replaced with sensibleness and boredom. this is true for most of the population, but there are exceptions of course. and i used to rue it on each birthday, since i knew i would be doing less crazy things in the year ahead, on account of being older. my theory was that this lunacy and sense of invincibility are absolutely essential if i wanted to live life on my terms, and these qualities draining away with age isn't a prospect one can look forward to. but then, ever since i got my bike, my opinion on this subject has been varying slowly as well. i now kinda realize that this lunacy, if untempered, isn't the adamantium that i thought it to be, but instead it was more like kryptonite, if you would pardon the superhero references.

sure a few close calls and accidents helped me along with this realization, but thats not the point. the point has more to do with the sense of invincibility that i mentioned earlier. the point, even more specifically, is that it is false, this sense of invincibility. there are those who would, after a close call or accident they escaped unscathed from, think that it was a matter of their invincibility. that nothing would happen to them. i admit to thinking that way a few times as well. but as you go along, and as you evolve as a biker (a familiar refrain for those amongst my annual readership of 1.78 people who were probably patient enough to read these musings of mine on biking), you realize that there is a significant difference between what you can actually do and what you think you can do. there is a difference between how fast you can go as opposed to how fast you think you can go, how much you can bank as opposed to how much you think you can, and how quickly you can stop as opposed to how quickly you think you can stop. and that realization isn't necessarily the death of lunacy, it's more of a tempering.

the lunacy and invincibility would make you want to try out MotoGP levels of bank angles on the curvy road leading to your office. and let's be honest, it would be fun to try that. in fact, to push yourself to the limit doing anything like that does require a healthy amount of insanity. the tempering business that i'm talking about would try and keep you from going over your limits and making a spectacle of yourself for the other employees walking on that same road after their lunch breaks. the fact that you didn't crash isn't a victory for sensibleness. but the fact that you pushed a limit while acknowledging it, the fact that you tried, is a victory for a tempered lunacy. while all of this might sound like a justification for doing less dangerous stuff on account of getting older, i sincerely believe in it.

in the end, i do realize that i'm still far from a perfect driver. like i've mentioned in one of these posts long back, i still make mistakes that warrant a kick on the backside sometimes. but as the kilometers have been racking up on my odometer, the realization that all of these evaluations and self-appraisals and improvement efforts mean nothing in the face of things beyond your control has planted itself firmly in my mind. and that all you can do in the face of things like chance is to continuously try and get better, have fun doing it, and to hell with the rest. and i suspect i could apply that to other walks of my life as well.

PS - i think the really dangerous thing i did here was posting twice in a day. also, it's funny how these ramblings materialize when i'm sleep-deprived. it's bloody five thirty in the morning, good night.

Happy B'day, Rocinante :)

My bike turns four today. It's been a helluva ride, almost 50k kilometers. I'm proud of the fact that she's done more kms on long trips than on the office commute. She's my life and love, my pride and joy, blood sweat and tears and all the other cliches possible. I love that bike.

We've been through a lot together. I've had 28 accidents, for starters. I've been airborne and underwater(and how!) on it, both true stories by the way. Skin was scraped, bones were broken, money was spent on expensive and hard-to-get spares, yet the biking spirit endures. I've been to chennai 9 times, pondicherry and goa 4 times each, shivanasamudram twice and once each to sakleshpur, coorg, bombay pune and ahmedabad. And a hundred other places remain on my list.

I hope to do ladakh some day soon, maybe even another country, though that is a distant dream. If i could, i'd go around the world, in a heartbeat. I've done enough miles to cover the equatorial circumference of the earth, and i hope we eventually cover the equivalent of the distance to the moon. I wanna go to the north east on a wild goose chase to find the elusive sonam kazi. I want to chill with the delhi folks after a ride through rajasthan. I want to see pushkar, jaisalmer and bikaner, probably even make an offering at the biker baba shrine thereabouts.

But above all, I want to say its been a helluva ride. I've seen parts of this country in a way few other people have. I've had the most amazing experiences, hurtling through dusty villages on hot afternoons, racing downhill on the ghats against the sunset, scrambled to escape the clutches of a rainstorm, tasting roadside chai in unlikely places, tearing up and down the highways in what can only be called a pursuit of happiness. temporary and fleeting happiness that disappears when i get to work on monday, yes, but a very important happiness nonetheless. A happiness that helped me keep my head amongst a life varying between the mundane and the insane. And for that, i'm grateful i have this bike, a sport tourer extraordinaire. I'm as much in love with my bike today as i was on the day i bought it.

Someone was dead-on right when they said, "Four wheels move the body, two wheels move the soul"

PS- I secretly christened my bike rocinante a few months after id started touring, in honor of Don Quixotes faithful steed. My pursuits are quixotic after all :)

Also, pratheek sends his wishes :)

story of a story of a..

I was writing a story. I still am writing it, in fact. Fleshing it out, so to speak. It started out as a script for a short film since a friend was bugging me to write one for him, but once we discussed it over, it turned out that this was gonna be too long for a short film, but i decided to go ahead and write it anyway, since it's been a while since i tried my hand at stories. the idea had been kicking around in my head since i saw the movie Ghost Rider, but it hadn't quite taken shape until recently, when the aforementioned friend bugged me.

The story is about a guy who, for reasons undisclosed (which means i still have to write a credible backstory for him), decides to die. he decides life isn't worth living, and it made no sense to him to fight all the meaningless battles he had to in every waking hour of every living day of his self-titled miserable life. so he decides to quit battling, quit life. being a coward, he decides suicide isnt for him. so he figured another way. he was going to walk on the lips of death, seeing if they'll open sometime and take him in. so he starts pushing the envelope, so to speak.

since i've already mentioned ghost rider, and since i'm a bike lover myself, you probably guessed that he is going to push the limits on his bike. and since iv already labelled him a coward, there were enough possibilities to play around with the physical courage vs mental courage angle, since it does take courage to stunt on a bike. so our hero starts with simple stuff that was scary to him before, and soon finds himself increasing the danger quotient. pushing the proverbial limit millimetres at a time, he finds himself emerge successful each time, so he pushes it some more. the cycle continues until one day he realizes that he has become good at this one thing in life, possibly the best one earth, evel knievel league. and this all important realization comes to him in the middle of the stunt that will kill him.

as soon as this idea had started taking form in my head, i tried to create this protagonist guy, and it kept falling apart. things weren't fitting where they were supposed to,and i wasn't too thrilled with the road my story was taking. it soon was eating my mind in my spare time, and i had to fix the story somehow. it so happened that one day, on my commute back from office on my bike, i was riding with my mind on autopilot and the story popped up in my head again. stories are good things to ruminate when you're coasting along at 80 kmph.

I am a fast driver, but i am also one to take safety seriously. i mean, i'm not above jumping a red light, but many of those who've ridden with me would vouch for me if i say that i dont like taking unnecessary risks. a crazy though seized me, and i found myself in the mind of my story's hero. so, what would he do?

soon enough, caution was gone with the wind that was washing over me, and i watched the needle climb upwards of 110, in peak evening traffic. i overtook vehicles with narrow clearances, shooting through red lights at crazy speeds, slaloming across a line of cars.. there was a curve on the way home, with a bump at its apex, and experience told me 40 was the speed there. today, it was going to be 70. the roads were damp from an afternoon shower, and my mind was blank as i was briefly airborne, still blank as i watched the bike slide to the curb and miss a car by an inch or so, all in slow motion. the thought that i may have taken this too far did occur for a flash, but somehow the thought of backing out didn't follow it. shooting through a red light, a cop jumped into the middle of the road to stop me, and i played chicken with him, trusting in his cowardice to get him out of my way. one violent turn of the bike was made to ensure he didnt catch the registration.

the madness ended on the lane home, where my cousin met me and we were to figure out where to have dinner. once that was done, i hopped on the bike and started it, only to realize that i had a flat tyre. it had by then been apparent to me that my prior misadventure was a bit much, but now i realized exactly how much. ten minutes earlier, and that flat wouldve been catastrophic. the moment that followed wasnt one of realization, but one of fear and deflation.

maybe stories are better told, not lived.

POSTSCRIPT : the facts.. i am writing a story, i do drive fast, i did get a flat tyre. the rest have been stringed together from incidents that happened to me/were witnessed by me over the week preceding my writing this. yes, this is fictional, just another late night attempt at an idea to get a short film out of my original story idea, but one that might not work considering this isnt easy to film either. nor am i happy with it. and no, do NOT comment on my driving.

notes from the road..

ill be honest with you, when it comes to roadtrips, im a little superstitious. i stop at places i think are lucky, i consider some things to be omens, etc.. all because of the total uncertainty that comes with hopping on a bike and just taking off. its kinda scary, ill admit. so, when a trip is preceded by a series of unfortunate events that under normal circumstances i would consider bad omens, its kinda amazing the trip happened at all. it was supposed to be a ride to ladakh, but due to lack of preparation i pushed it by a week, only to receive news that the lahaul-spiti valley route that i was planning to take was closed due to unseasonal snowfall and that the army were airlifting people out of there. so i decided it was a good idea that i was going to leave only a week late, only to find out that my laptop blew something and needed expensive repairs. which took a hit on my budget, and left me with too little money to do the trip to ladakh. so i decided on rajasthan instead. all this while poeple who said they'd want to ride along or ride pillion were dropping out of the plan, so along with everything else, i had to consider the fact that i had to ride alone, which is not something iv done except for a coupla chennai pondicherry trips. and in the meantime there was the whole circus of providing excuses and justifications to people who expressed concern about this undertaking, as well as the usual elaborate set of lies to cover my tracks from my parents :P so all things considered, there were enough reasons not to go.

so why did it happen, why did i go? well, have you ever gotten tired of planning something, dreaming of something, talking about something, but never actually doing it? tired of doubts, both from within and from others, tired of being scared of the unknown, and what it'll bring? well i have. at some point the sheer curiosity of what this experience would be like got the better of all the concerns, worries, superstitions, doubts etc.. so i literally said to myself on saturday the 26th, sometime in the afternoon, fuck all this, ive gotta go. so i hastily borrowed 5k, hopped on the bike without the usual bunch of spares, oil and stuff, and was off on sunday. and, on the night of the sixth, reached bangalore safely after about 3700 kms on the road.

so these are the notes from the adventure.. be warned, they are kinda random, copied from my book.

stats :

distance: 3700 + kilometres (speedo cable was out for most of the way to ahmedabad, and thanks to durga pooja, no mechanic was open all the way :| )

fastest stretch : belgaum kolhapur, average speed 100kmph

slowest stretch : 30 km post satara, average speed 30kmph, heavy rain, took an excruciating hour

chai stops : 15 (chitradurga, hubli, kolhapur, pune, andheri, kharod, ahmedabad, baroda, surat, asgani, kankavli, morjim) for a grand total of 37 cups of tea :D

punctures : 1

accidents : 1

birdhits : 1 (hit and killed a crow that was just taking off. couldnt be helped. if i'd managed to avoid it, i couldve added a 'no animals were harmed in the making of this trip' tag to mine.)

fuel cost : rs 4265 wonlee

trucks

most drivers i know hate trucks. mostly because these fuckers are scary on the road. and for the most part i agree. but there are reasons why i like trucks too. the vast majority of them, mostly the longhaul truckers and not those insane ones on eichers and smaller trucks, are professionals. they use the low beam at night, they move right over if you honk before and overtake, and on a slightly evil note, they make good obstacles for any cars you might wanna race :D they also have the most amusing things written behind them. i thought all trucks had the usual Horn OK Please and We Two Ours Two lines written behind, but having seen enough trucks now,im happy to report that some have absolute gems behind them. i read off 'naseeb apna apna' (which kinda struck me considering luck does play a good part in these roadtrips), 'hai bombay chellam' (on a tamilnadu truck, guess he was kicked about doing bombay runs), 'A zara hatke' (which made me chuckle), etc etc. even the simple 'awaaz do' instead of horn please, painted in styles that would make WordArt proud, was refreshing to see. yes, you do get bored on the road, this is one of the many ways i keep myself amused, especially when there isnt much of a spectacular view around.

also, i play this game. the taufeeq vs siyad game. when i was maybe three, i used to categorize the flat fronted lorries as siyad, and the snouty ones as taufeeq, ostensibly since i must've seen examples of the two lorry types bearing those names. so i count how many taufeeqs and siyads i see. siyad usually wins, but then i start trying to give statistical weights to taufeeq sightings, and try and equalize them in my head, by when i realize that im out on a trip to have fun, and not crunch numbers, so my mind drifts on to less tedious matters.

volvos

i hereby state that i hold in high regard every vehicle with a volvo badge on it. especially the buses. pretty much whatever i can do on the bike in terms of speed and manoeuvrability, they can do it too. and that is very, very scary.

puncture

when i had planned the ladakh trip, i wanted to keep a puncture repair kit with me in case i got a flat in the middle of nowhere. but when i started this trip on impulse, i didnt bother to get one. but i did get a flat, and it so happened that it was right in front of four puncture shops. i didnt know whether to put it down to fate or to the possibility that these same shop guys might have planted nails in the road there. either way, i needed a new tube, and pintu (the mechanic i woke up with great difficulty from his post dussehra revlery slumber) and i did a 1.5 kilometer trek to the tube shop. i say trek because it was a tough walk, negotiating between deep potholes on the side of the road as well as the garbage piled besides them. the tube guy was again woken with great difficulty, and in his drunken slumber he sold me a tube worth 350 for a mere 200. pintu mentioned this fact to me only after we left the tube shop, saying 'woh chutiya ban gaya, aap ka tube 350 ka tha'. to celebrate, i bought him tea n snakes at a restaurant that was open on our way back. it is a different matter though that pintu did a piss-poor job of fitting the tube and i had to stop 17 kms later to get it fixed properly.

police escort

ahmedabad is a very confusing city to drive into, and i lost my way almost immediately. the irony wasnt lost on me, after having navigated bombay and pune without a map. i stopped to ask a two policemen on a bike, who were talking to two other chaps on another bike. they noticed the KL registration on my bike and asked me where i was coming from. once they heard my answer, and once it sunk in, they insisted on driving with me to show me the way to paldi. on the way, we stopped for tea, and i was only too grateful and glad to answer their questions about my ride. one of the guys on the other bike, pravinbhai, was a building contractor, and wanted to know if his hero honda splendour would make it to delhi. i told him yes, i dont know why. and he wistfully said, yeah i guess the rider has to be strong, not the ride. the cops turned off before the paldi bridge, denying me the childish glee of riding into nid as part of a motorcade :P

dogs

i saw the cutest stray puppy ever on the road to khed. the little guy nearly ran into my path, but this time i was slow enough to stop, unlike with the crow. i wanted to bring him with me to bangalore, and actually pondered the possibility with midhun, my cousin who was riding with me part of the way, but decided against it. i was worried he'd get run over out there, and sure enough there was a dead puppy a few kilometres later. felt kinda sad. and ironically, today i spoke to marion and she told me they are looking for a puppy, and i felt like kicking myself for not having brought him with me. i hope he's ok.

wipers

old boyhood notions never die, they just transform. i used to think as a kid that spectacles with wipers would be kickass cool, now i think helmets with wipers would be kickass cool.

rain ride

as much as i hate riding in the rain in the city, id always wanted to do a long trip in the rain. well, i got my wish this time, except i was least prepared for it. of the 3700 kilometres, 500+ were done in pouring rain. if i count wet roads too, i could add another hundred odd kilometres to that. and it was hell, to say the least. the rain was so strong on approach to pune that i couldnt see a thing except the tail lamp of the car in front of me. it took me an hour to do 30 kilometres, stopping multiple times on the way. not that the stopping helped, there was usually no place to shelter, and i just stood by the side of the road looking like an idiot while people in cars which were warm inside passed by. i had to remind myself multiple times that i asked for this adventure, and iv gotta take what i get. my phone and camera died, and my clothes, even the ones inside my allegedly waterproof bag, were soaked.

but to be honest, if it werent for the rain, the experience wouldve been much less exciting. there were random moments, like when i sheltered in a shed in the middle of a sugarcane farm with some 20 odd people, and waited out the storm wondering if the shed would hold, while someone passed around masala peanuts. no one spoke a word, but the gratitude was visible on everyones faces.

riding from bombay to khed on NH17, i realized i may have found a motoring heaven in india. it was a beautiful twisting mountain road, treacherous due to the pouring rain. we hit this stretch towards sunset, and the lack of light compounded problems. and then we ran into fog. visibility was reduced to a few metres at best, and i was honestly wondering whether im gonna be one of the first guys in history to die after reaching heaven, as opposed to the other way round, which im told is more conventional. after a few minutes of literally stumbling around on the mountain road, a jeep came along and i decided to follow his tail lamp. god bless the guy who thought of tail lamps. if this jeep was gonna drive off a cliff, i didnt care, i was gonna follow that tail lamp.

the only time we had to succumb to the rain was at chiplun. after 270 kilometres in continuous pouring rain, we were dampened both spiritually and physically. my eyes were red from the raindrops hitting it at high speed (helmet visor down meant poor visibility), all clothes were soaked, the bike which had so far been misfiring like a north korean missile upped the ante a bit and was now misfiring like a pakistani copy of a north korean missile, and i was shivering too bad to even be able to hold the cup of chai i had in my hand. my cousin midhun, who had joined me for part of the ride, was rubbing his palms against the chai cup for warmth. i made some kinda lame joke asking him to rub it on the cigarette for more warmth, and he had this incredulous expression on his face before he asked me how on earth is it that the bad jokes section of my brain is still intact after all the beating we'd just taken. i guess this news would worry a lot of people :D

bad jokes

bad jokes are a good way of killing time on the boring stretches. you could thank the stars that i dont even remember half the ones i came up with, though the folks over at the daily punnedits page wouldve appreciated it. place names along the way are a good source for generating these jokes. for instance, theres a place called Kim on the way from bombay to ahmedabad. so if you take your car and make a dash for Kim, you could be Kim Car-dashian. its terrible, but i was chuckling for miles after i passed the board that said 'Kim' :P

oh and on the hill roads outside bombay i came up with this one.. which town exists merely to inconvenience you? khed in maharashtra. asuvidha ke liye khed hai. :D

other funny place names for which i had made up jokes but forgot them include watre, gangwali, aani, garag, kundi and unn. next time i should somehow attach a dictaphone to my helmet :D

but all things aside, humour is a good way to keep going especially when you're tired after riding hundreds of kilometers, but would have to do a hundred more to get to where you want to go.

BCU, BHU

one astronomical unit, or AU, is equal to the mean distance between the earth and the sun. similarly i made up the BCU and the BHU. the BCU stands for Bangalore Chennai Unit, and BHU for Bangalore Hosur Unit. they are roughly equal to 340km and 40 km respectively. they serve no practical purpose except to boost my morale. when i've ridden 400 kms, and i have another 350 to go, i tell myself, hey thats just one BCU away. and bangalore chennai is a route i've driven 8 or 9 times. and even though the road im on would be hell compared to the beautiful highway to chennai, the fact that im only as far away as chennai from bangalore would lift my spirits a little, and keep me going. BHU is used similarly, during that last phases of rides, when you're getting into a city and have to put up with tons of traffic after having done such a long smooth ride. so i remind myself i take an hour to get to hosur, and that is far worse than what im facing right now.

push the mind, the body will follow

while im loath to give a moral of the story, i will admit that each of these roadtrips have given me little nuggets of learning. on the morning of friday the 2nd in ahmedabad, i woke up with a fever. i had to ride to bombay and then onwards to goa that day, and the plan was to do over a thousand km that day. i didnt tell anyone of the fever, and made excuses for not leaving in the morning while i slept all day to see if the fever will subside. it didnt. im the evening i decided to leave anyway. and i was amazed for the next twelve odd hours. once i made the decision to leave, the fever disappeared. there was no more body ache. the ride to bombay was smooth, and i halted at bhartiyas house for three hours of rest before heading to goa. three hours of sleep later, things were still fine. then i got the news that goa, along with pretty much most of southern india, was flooded and that i wouldnt be able to ride. and once that realization hit me, the fever and aches returned in half an hour and i was popping crocins. that sorta thing has never happened to me before. i was genuinely amazed that it happened, though i make no claims of being able to repeat it. but, at the cost of sounding like one of those pesky self help book authors whom you see on shopping channels, ill say that if you push the mind, the body will follow.

since this has been a random assortment of trip notes, i dont quite have an end piece for this. but considering all the experiences, only about a third of which ive written about here, ill say the same thing i told my friend nithin on the phone.. i got out looking for a kilo of adventure, ended up with a ton instead.

I know I've been around planes too long when..

There's a thread running on airliners.net about how aviation creeps into the lives of us airplane fanatics..since i qualify for the title of aviation fanatic (in fact, if it were like real education, i'd probably be a triple phd or something on useless airplane facts), i read the thread with what you can imagine to be great glee. People were posting little things that they did in their day to day lives which were a direct effect of their love for aircraft. Like saying roger, when you want to indicate that you understood something. I have a list of my own when it comes to stuff like that, so i thought i might as well write them down.

My biggest offence is to pretend im flying a plane when i ride my bike. To most people, starting up a bike is a reasonably straightforward deal, especially if they have electric start as an option. But for me, it has to be an elaborate affair, as if i were spooling up a jet engine. i turn the key, pull back on the choke, press the starter button, listen to the engine cough to life, imagine its creating a smoke screen behind me like the rolls royce RB211s on a Tristar, wait for the straining sound that the choke makes, pull back on the choke lever pretending its a lever on my cockpit's throttle quadrant, pull the clutch and put it into gear, and then burn through the clutch in the name of feeling the rpms build up, just like it would when a jet spools up. and then im happy.

well not completely happy, cos then i start making estimations for times of arrival, time enroute, alternate routes (since alternate destination like in an airplane is not possible since im gonna be ending up in offce/home at the end of the ride anyway) etc..and when i have to make tight turns or turn around, i hit the throttle just before im aligned straight with the road, just the way i've seen some captains go full thrust a moment before the plane is aligned with the runway centreline. the thrust straightens out the plane as well as the bike, and i get this incredible rush each time it happens, be it on the bike or the plane. oh, and when a im approaching a traffic light that's turning yellow, i mentally call out V1 (the speed beyond which takeoff cannot be rejected) and gun the throttle and zoom through the light, calling 'rotate' once im through.. and when im caught at a red light and if i happen to be right at front, i perform what i call a carrier take off, building up rpms and then letting go, with the tyres skidding and straining to get me up to speed. Oh, and on the rare occasions that i do a wheelie, i call it a high alpha pass.. and then im happy.

of course, the list doesn't end there, far from it. setting right aviation related misconceptions and mistakes, even when my services were unwelcome, is another angle to it. this includes vigorously shaking my head and then making an explanation to my friends when i spot a mistake in a movie. that we are in a theatre does not matter in the least, nor does it matter that they couldn't care two hoots about what i consider to be a sacrilegious mistake. I mean, it may have been practical for the director to show a small regional jet from the outside yet use a twin aisle plane for the interior shot cos its roomier, but i will have none of that. nor will i stand for it when torpedoes are dropped on the ground or when other such stupid things are done.

aircraft recognition is another of these little habits. each time a plane flies above me, i have to crane up and recognize it. its a compulsion. seeing alone will not do. the very least requirement is a recognition of the operator, type and subtype. its not enough that i recognize its a 737, i keep straining my neck and increasing my chances of spondilitis till i figure whether its a 737-700 or 737-800. and if i catch the registration, especially on my visits to places close to the airport, then the day becomes significantly brighter. and if i spot a rare type, like for instance the day i spotted an Antonov 124 at IGI delhi, delirium ensues..sure, i do figure that it gets a bit annoying for those around, considering they dont share the interest, but this is something a lot of us plane nuts have in common.

what i have found most interesting about aicraft lovers is the passion that is shared. to me, it seems a lot more intense than most of the other hobbies and hobbyists i know. i have seen total strangers bond over their common love for aviation, in a way i havent seen much before. its not quite the same as a love for cars, bikes or comic books, but then that's just my opinion. all i know is that i spend two thirds of my waking hours doing thinking about planes, or doing something related to aviation. if i hear the drone of an engine, i look up. if i have to travel, i'll take the longest layovers to spend more time at the airport. i'd do the 50km ride to bangalore airport on the bike just to see off a friend, when im actually seeing the planes. its a passion, its one that keeps me going, and its one that i dont care if those around me don't share it with me.

it's my little world, one where im supersonic, flying on a flightplan that has no destination, only waypoints.

Addendum : I suppose its ironic that two days after i posted this, ive been moved into non aero work. damn you, recession.. :(

Mutton Hayabusa..

Those who have had the misfortune of knowing me also know the fact that I love cooking, and that i consider myself a reasonably good, if rather accident prone and messy cook. i'll lay the blame for the cooking bit on my mom, who had the foresight to realize even as i was a kid, that i will someday end up with some girl who won't be able to tell salt from pepper without reading the labels, and that a foodie like her son would end up eating hotel food, canned food and other lesser morsels all his life. so she decided to teach me (and my brother, but thats a different story) how to cook, sorta like an added skill to our survival kit for adult life. She also tried the same approach with washing clothes, and other household chores but that didn't quite meet with the same sort of success as cooking did. so i ended up loving cooking, but utterly loathing the cleaning up after it. either way, the cooking continues to this day.

one of the first things i mastered was what mom and i called the railway roast. it was the dry egg roast that they served with appam on the vanchinad express that we took when visiting grandparents in trivandrum, and in my opinion, its the perfect way to cook eggs. of course, that was just the starting point in a long stint with cookery. what i liked best was the creative side of things. i mean, i cook the way i drive. recipes, like traffic rules, are more suggestions than anything else. so, just like i wont drive in the opposite lane but would jump a red light if no one's looking, u can stick to the basic recipe and still experiment enough to come up with drastically different and interesting culinary results. while you might not be able to duplicate the nuances of a particularly successful experiment a second time round, its still worth the thrill of having made something that probably no one in their senses would have tried.

which led me to my own recipes, eventually. the first of which was vodka chicken and chicken kalyani (named in honor of kalyani black label beer). now, addition of alcohol like wine and vodka is a common enough practise, but i doubt very many chefs would have made a gravy that was held together primarily by the alcohol. which is the sort of experiment that i like... its sorta like playing with old tyres.. y'know, when as a kid you used to run rolling the tyre along by beating it with a stick.. you have to constantly keep balancing it and striking it to keep it moving, and ur happy when it does the simple task of rolling along smoothly while you run beside it. Just the same with these recipes, you start off in a certain direction, and as you wander along you keep adding and subtracting stuff with the aim of making something tasty.. constant mid-course updates to ensure you get it right.

of course, all of this eventually struck me as rather empirical.. i mean, the two successful recipes were the results of situations or accidents, and its a miracle that i can recreate these to some degree of satisfaction. so i decided to try and conceptualize food. y'know, build a recipe out of thin air , inside my head, and then prove it empirically, instead of throwing things around and then making recipes out of them. now, i am also an avid aviation enthusiast, as well as a bike maniac, and it so happens that the hayabusa bike from suzuki was designed in a wind tunnel. which means that they put molten modelling clay on the chassis and left it in a wind tunnel and the wind gave it the form. well, not exactly, but you get the gist. now this train of thought frequently visits the station that is my mind, considering its got wind tunnels and bikes on board, and ive always been fascinated by it. and as i was standing by my bike having a smoke yesterday, i was suddenly hit by the gastronomic enlightenment that i should make a recipe out of it. wind tunnel designed food, if you will..

now, i know this sounds ludicrous, which is why i loved the idea. so i set about thinking what i could make.. it obviously had to have the metaphor of a chassis and the modelling clay. i ruled out chicken right away since it would make for an ugly chassis, and beef would mean too huge a chassis, quail and rabbit would mean too small a chassis, and fish would mean a made-in-bengal chassis which even ratan tata shied away from. so mutton it had to be, by this simple process of elimination. process, thats what it was all about. i may never have followed proper design process in a single project i ever did, but i was neck deep in process here. probably mutton ribs, they would be the perfect size for my chasis.

the next part was the molten clay and the wind tunnel. i tackled the wind tunnel first. it was apparent pretty soon that a blowing with a hair dryer will not cook mutton, so a literal wind tunnel was out of the question. and other conventional methods like a spit roast would be useless too, since the fire would be below and the gravy would flow from top to bottom. so the metaphor was altered a bit, and heat rays became the equivalent of the wind in the tunnel. this now meant i could use anything to heat it as long as it was radiation heated. you might at this point be thinking whether i hadn't taken my analogy a bit too far, and you're right, i did think of that. but then all such doubts soon vanished since i was having waaay too much fun by now. this was almost as much fun as designing doomed-to-fail payload rockets on diwali.

so, on to the clay then. which, of course would be the masala for the meat. now a good chef never reveals the entire contents of his masala mix, so neither will i. but then this is more due to the fact that my mix will consist of whatever i haven't run out of by the time i actually test this thing. but then, the image of the wind forming the melting clay on the chassis was too vivid in my imagination that i decided the masala has to melt on to the chassis. um, meat. for once, since i was inventing my own recipe, i couldnt take things casually, you see. now the list of edible things that also melt is a pretty short list. I can only think of butter mozzarella and the like. i did a short search to see if there were any edible waxes, but gave up on that line sensing that it would mean impending disaster to my blooming career as a cook. chocolate was avoided as well since being a southie, spicy is the norm and if the food doesn't make you shoot flames from the mouth that are at least as long as the chandrayaan rocket exhaust, the food aint worth it. besides, sweet is a bit too gujju, that goat wouldnt pardon me. so lets just say im thinking of cheese, and leave it at that.

and like any proud parent, i had the dilemma of what to name my baby, since i was torn between wind-tunnel gosht, and mutton hayabusa, but eventually settled for the more exotic sounding latter. of course, this post is now coming to an anti-climactic end, but let me just remind anyone who's foolhardy enough to have read this far, that the proof of the mutton, just as with the pudding, is in the eating. which obviously means i need some lab rats. Four unwitting souls are coming for lunch at my place on saturday, i wonder if...

watch this space for the results. :D

Muffled roar..

More on the bike, avoidable :
i've been listening a lot to the sounds i hear on the road lately, and have come to the conclusion that the sound a bike makes is its most interesting bit, its defining quality. You could build a bike thats so fast its lunacy to ride it, you can make one thats so beautiful that it demands hara kiri if you scratch it, but unless it has a sound that matches it, its all but useless. or so i think. based on some random observations on the road.

take the yamaha r15 for instance. its a good looking bike if you ignore the thin tyres (which you cant, really, since it looks like scwarzenegger with skinny legs) and the puny engine inside (same schwarzenegger with congenital heart defect?) but once you hear its sound.. well thats like old arnie caught a sore throat and has been asked by the doctor to whisper for the next few weeks. this is not to say that i love those bikes(especially smaller two strokes) where the stock silencer has been replaced with a free flow can and you hear their racket from a distance, making all the noise in the world to do a mere seventy kmph. They tick me off even worse. I sorta think that these are like babies farting. I mean, the sound is so disproportionate that you can't quite wrap your head around the fact that something so small can produce something so loud (and foul).

what i'm talking about is the appropriateness of the sound. harleys are so loud they could probably bring down some old buildings as they ride by, but the image of the harley is such that the sound to match it couldn't possibly be any lesser. same with enfields. the enfield, while it does possess a certain charm, wouldn't ever be accused of being a beauty contest winner. but the sound makes it beautiful. you're cruising along, and the thump the bike makes goes perfectly with the image of a heavy old bike being ridden by a content guy.
then again, loud doesnt have to do it. the honda activa is proof of that, i think. that thing takes you around so smoothly and effortlessly, and is such good fun to ride. and the soft hum that it makes seems tailormade for it. or even the mopeds that you usually see near beach resorts.. i used to have one, and it makes this continuous putter that irritates the hell out of everyone. but i loved that sound, cos most people cant admit that mopeds are fun, and some people i know were especially irritated to see me having fun on one. so the irritating putter was more than apt.

which brings me to my current bike, the zma. before i bought it, one of my friends told me that it has a problem with the end can, that it rattles after a few thousand kilometers on the odo, producing a distinctly metallic din as you rode by. and to be fair, apart from the fuel efficiency (im thinking of buying shares in that iran oil pipeline) the only other complaint i had of the bike was the sound. so i added a k&n filter. this is my first ever admission of this fact, but i added the filter mainly to improve the sound. i couldnt care if it gave me added acceleration and lesser fuel efficiency,i needed a better sound. and now it has this muffled roar, which gives a sense of restrained aggression, which is perfect for a sport tourer that takes me on unending roads at more than respectable speeds.
and i'm a pilgrim of that muffled roar :)

Ninety degrees that wont leave my mind..

im obsessed with a curve. on the road, unfortunately, and not on a girl. i dunno if you relate to this kinda obsession, but sometimes something seemingly inoccuous seizes your imagination in an inexplicable manner, and you just follow it, and dont question why. this curve is like that, sorta. its on my usual office route, a rather dangerously sharp one thats a proper corner, ninety fucking degrees. just barely qualifies to be a curve. but ever since the first time i've ridden it, its been like a yardstick to me. i nearly crashed the first time, since i didn't expect such a sharp curve at the end of what has now become a 120 kmph stretch for me. nearly hit the sidewalk the first time, banking so low over the sand covering the edges of the road that i couldnt utter the standard-issue set of expletives since i was pretty much sure i had my heart in my mouth. and i have been hooked since. it has become the highlight of my daily commute to office, a sort of scale against which i try and self assess my riding ability. the obsession is to master this curve.

its a seemingly simple task, and i could say that i have done it to a good degree of success, but somehow that doesnt do it for this particular curve. it lies there every morning, regardless of everything else around, as an open challenge. and somehow, i kinda think it demands to be taken perfectly. thats the essence of the obsession. i may not become perfect at anything else i do ever in my life, but i have to be perfect when i take this curve. i dunno if you can relate to that kind of a thought, especially since i cant relate to it myself. i mean, its nonsense, if you think of it. i try to dismiss all thoughts about this curve when i start my ride in the morning, but halfway down the ride i'm plotting already. i have my best speeds and lines, yesterday's speeds and line, calculations about what i'll do today, thoughts about traffic, all running through my mind as i approach it. i dump speed as i enter it, bank as low as i dare keeping as much speed as possible and wondering if there's enough traction, open throttle at the apex, make sure my line misses the gravel and then take a quick peek at the speedometer to figure if i've done good, all in the space of a second or less.

and the next few minutes are spent contemplating on where i can improve, what i did wrong, etc. sometimes it goes as far as affecting my day, in a way. i look at it as a horoscope on some random days. if something has changed about the curve, say for instance theres a vehicle parked there restricting my antics, or someone's unloaded gravel or theres shattered glass lying around after an accident, then i kinda think the day might be different too. not your usual black-n-white good-or-bad omen, just a vague inkling. most often it turns out to be nonsense, but for at least half a kilometer after the curve, these are usually the thoughts that hit me.

the funny thing is, i have a suspicion that i would never know when i have done it perfectly. i have a feeling that in the middle of all this, i might not be the best judge of what's perfect and whats not. and judgement obviously isnt easy when your butt is hanging off to the right of the seat, your shoe is scraping the ground, your heart plus some assorted innards are trying to get into your mouth and people are looking at you like you've lost it. and that's what gets to me. i might take this curve perfectly, hell i might already have, and i'll probably never know. Ive tried different criteria, none worked. i initially thought that getting the fastest exit speed would be the key to happiness. i've done seventy and have self-certified myself as a lunatic, but that didnt seem to be it. i could probably get to eighty, and i know it wont do the trick, especially since i used to believe nothing more than sixty five was possible. tried looking at the best, smoothest, sweeping line across it, that didnt work either. i've tried to judge based on braking, acceleration, the sound the bike makes, and each time i think somethings good, something else doesn't fit, and i get mad as hell thinking i'll never know if i've done it right.

either i'm a lousy judge, or maybe perfection is just a compromise.

PS : All antics performed in this piece are done by an effing idiot, kids, please dont try this at home.

A weird day in the life of...

i woke up dreaming i was being strangled. whenever a dream wakes me up it usually has some correlation with real life. when i dream that my head is being banged against a table, there's usually someone banging on the door, if i dream of flooding, it usually means i left the bathroom tap open last night when there was no water and now that morning brought water its overflowing. strangulation and drowning usually meant i was in the middle of an asthma attack. not that it bothered me much, my canister of instant relief was lying by my bedside. a coupla shots, and im back to superman. except this time i'm wrong, the inhaler is on my office table, amongst the multitude of junk that i've accumulated there, like a magpie's nest. and this usually means i have to go out to the nearest medical store, and get a new one. fair enough, i think, and begin to get up, only i can't get up. whoever was strangling me in the dream had already done a bloody good job. the bike was out of the question, and a hospital enters the equation, much to my dislike.

i pick up my phone, another bedside object, and call the number for a cab which a friend had once kindly given me when i was stuck with a flat tyre in the middle of the night a few weeks ago. i lay around taking deep breaths till the cab comes, recovering enough to walk down. its always like a video game, if i stay still, i get back some of my health points and can move about a bit. only i cant stay still till i recover completely, that would take the bloody day. the cab is here, i put a sweater on, realize i dont need it, but keep it on anyway, and begin moving down the stairs like a seventy year old. and my wheezing would put the nilgiri steam train to shame. three hours of wires, tubes and needles pass by as a blur, and the medics have restored me to full health. i can resume the game again, and the phone is already ringing with my next mission.

its a friend, who was till recently a neighbour. i dont tell her that ive just been patched up, lest she not give me the mission. she is a biker, and had arranged for her bike to be sent to delhi from here, and turns out the courier guy was now untraceable with no news on the whereabouts of the bike that was sent ten days ago. the bike isn't worth all that much monetarily, at least compared to mine, but i understand her plight immediately since she probably values it more than i do mine in terms of sentimental value.

so its back to the house, on to my own faithful steed, and off to office to print out her email with the details of the courier and to go snoop around. what fun, a real life detective story. except of course, its no cakewalk. there's obstacles to be taken care of first. i'm also a juggler on the side, and i have three projects on my act. and one of those, a short week's assignment, ends tomorrow and i havent started on it, and have been evading the boss' call for a discussion the last coupla days. which means that if i don't show him something today, i'm screwed. dont get me mistaken, i dont usually bother to give deadlines too much respect. if i meet them, i meet them, if not, well, too bad.. which probably explains why all the aero engineers that gave anonymous feedback on me as part of our appraisal process said the same thing : he knows enough about airplanes that we can't fool him and make our work easier (and his difficult, conversely), but he needs to manage his time better. as you can see, our attitudes on deadlines didnt really agree. so this short assignment was supposed to be my coup-de-grace, coming up with what was supposed to be insanely good stuff in a week, and in a week only. and i was on the verge of botching it.

so the first thing to do in office, obviously, is to run to the copier machine, grab some A3 sheets, and sketch like it was the end of the world. or the end of design, at least. of course, without any ideas no amount of sketching would come to anything, so i was forced to take time out, drink copious amounts of coffee, super strong, and then put my brain into overdrive to find a few vague notions around which i could make my living. with a sum total of three such notions in hand half an hour later, i start sketching again, all the time realizing that quick sketches were not much more than doodles, and that a paper napkin would do more justice to these than the A3 that i was wasting. either way, i was spinning stories in my mind to sell these, a lot depended on it. the mission of finding the missing bike seemed like it was long ago, though i was itching to help her out.

in the end, the obstacles were cleared. turns out the deadline got extended, and i was never told of the same cos they wanted to keep me on a tight leash. needless to say, they were more than surprised at the work i came up with, but on the flip side there's more to keep me tied down in the days to come. but that's a different story, for a different day. at about six, when i could justifiably say that i had done enough to keep my day's pay as a designer and could now moonlight as a part time private investigator, i stepped out of office. only to find a wall of water. it was raining in a way noah could relate to, and i wasn't noah. i'd shaved my beard a while ago. and i have a love-hate relationship with the rain, which was now tilting significantly in the direction of fanatical hatred. thanks to an errant dry cleaner, my life protecting armor that is a black and yellow jacket had been parted from me for the last one week, and having recently recovered from an asthma attack, i probably shouldnt be anywhere near the cold rain. dejected, i called my friend up and said that i would have to defer the mission by a day, weather permitting. turns out she doesnt know too many other moonlighting investigators in bangalore, especially ones unhindered by rain, so i kept my case.

the rest of the evening was hide and seek with the rain. when the rain finally hid, i hopped on the bike and made a dash for it, straight into the floodwaters on bannerghatta road. having literally drowned on this road once, bike and all, i had quite a time getting to dry ground. the rain hid long enough to lull me into a sense of security. i stopped for dinner on the road, and took my time eating and then having the routine chai. then, just as i got on my bike for the home run, all hell broke loose. the rain came down in bucketfuls, and i was soaked before i could find a bus shelter or shop to take refuge in. so, soaked to my underwear and cold to my bones, i rode on home in a crabby mood. sure enough, there was no power at home which meant that my favourite activity of wasting time on the internet was out of the question, so i got even crabbier, till i finally decided to get some candles from the nearby grocer's. in the candlelight, i noticed a murakami book lying around, one that i had wanted to read but wasn't able to find the time for. in a final effort to make something out of my day, i started reading it by the candlelight. and for the first time in a while, felt really good. i was fighting the urge to sleep and allowed the book to grip me, the candle flickering and dancing and adding to the ambience. it went on for hours. and just as i was enjoying myself for the first time in the day, the power came back, and bathed everything in the antiseptic light from the CFL. the mood was ruined, i got back to believing there was a grand conspiracy against me with even the electricity board involved. even the candle seemed to be mocking me by thwarting the attempts of the now enlivened fan to extinguish it. so i started writing this.

what a brilliant-lousy day.

In praise of the unscheduled stop..

y'know what i like? waypoints.. not the planned sort, those random ones that you make in the middle of journeys. i've always loved those, i'm a big sucker for an unscheduled stop. there is nothing i love more than a train stopping at a remote station for another train to cross it, or when a long distance bus pulls into a gas station or a restaurant, or when your flight gets diverted to another airport 'cos there was a thunderstorm over your destination. there is something strangely alluring about these places, even though they may not be particularly beautiful or interesting if you look at them from outside the perspective of an unscheduled stop. yet when the train pulls in at a station whose name i'm not sure i can pronounce, i run to the door at the risk of losing my seat, even.
i guess it's sorta like meeting someone you know you're not gonna meet again. like those strangers you strike up conversations with when travelling. you might find them interesting and try to talk more, or even end up talking more yourself knowing there's the safety of anonymity. you're only together for so long. they might lead dead ordinary lives outside of that interlude, but you might think they were the most interesing person you met. its the same with these places.
i step onto empty platforms with nothing but bored and sleepy dogs that are actively ignoring me, and i think i've reached someplace i might want to spend a long time in. i linger on the platform, trying to understand the smells and sounds of the place, and often stand transfixed long after the train has started moving, only to snap out and reluctantly walk, then jog and hop on the footboard of the coach that will take me to the destination. when the bus stops on a highway for passengers to answer nature's call, i get out even if i dont have to go and then play this little game of walking as far away from the bus as possible before i hear the driver honking and then rush back. when my flight to ahmedabad stops at bombay on the way, i walk down to the rear of the aircraft and stand as close to the open door as possible, and i can tell you that's about the only time i wish that i could be in bombay. cos i already know i'm going away.
similar things happen on the bike too. i'm an estimates guy. when i set off on the bike, i've got numbers running in my head. distance, estimated time of arrival, time enroute on various legs, fuel, mileage.. time being the most important. i get disturbed by people who want all the pencils on their desks facing the same direction, but i get pretty cranky if these numbers of mine get disturbed. which usually means the stops are pre-planned, and i zoom past for most of the journey. yet often, something catches my eye about some places. its more often a small rock or water filled ditch than a scenic mountain, but i stop for the couple of mintues allowed by the confidence that i can catch up with my numbers by riding faster and drink it all in.
i guess destinations dont hold that charm for me. i mean, when you get on a vehicle to go somewhere, you're most likely going to reach where its taking you. factor in all the obstacles and possibilities you could possibly think of, but even then the probability is well in the high nineties. and that is what bothers me about thinking of life as a journey, from birth to death. we forget wandering, we look at waypoints as just things to pass through, not to linger and savour. we are often too bothered about saving our seats than going to the door to see new stations waiting.

transdeccan.

it was not a trip, really. it was the cross section of a country. i chose to cut india from chennai to goa, and saw the country in a way most people can't. the policeman who hitched a lift in chennai, the dead cows outside the city limits, the hundreds of dead dogs, blotches on the road as martyrs to development, the simple life in the farms of karnataka, that asian chick on a pink enfield bullet.. it cant be seen anywhere else, and i think i can vouch for that with some degree of certainty. i got a chance to go on a roadtrip in america, and the actual trip was the part we dreaded though it was in a car far more comfortable than the bike i used for this 2000 km trip across the deccan. the roads there were arrow-straight, the scenery pretty much the same. nothing dramatic, nothing is thrown at you that you wouldnt expect, except maybe the odd deer crossing the road to become roadkill but then even that is marked by signs. no bullock cart coming opposite you on the fast lane on an expressway, no expressway disappearing into two feet deep potholes that nearly throw you off your ride, in short, nothing that you wouldnt expect, especially if you've been in that country a while.

well it certainly is more interesting here. take for instance, the fact that my pillion and i were cruising along what we though was the expressway to bangalore, only to find ourselves unexpectedly airborne after hitting a bump at 110 kmph. i doubt if you can find another country where there's an unmarked bump across the freeway. i know it couldve killed me, but im not complaining for now. if it were an arrow-straight road to goa, i would probably have taken the bus. which brings me to my point : the whole trip felt good because i took a risk. it was the longest trip i'd done. there were enough people and reasons telling me not to do it. that ranged from my own parents to skeptical friends, the condition of the roads to the endurance of the rider. but that one moment where you think, oh what the hell, im going... thats what biking is about methinks. its a gamble to trust ur fortunes on a machine and a million unknowns, and when your gamble pays off, you feel more alive than ever. the risk, the feeling of having done something out of the ordinary and mundane, that cannot be explained, it can only be experienced. you can sit on an armchair and compare biking to any number of alternative activities, but nothing will come close to even beginning to describe that experience.

it teaches you about what it means to be alive, what life is. your sense of perspective changes in ways you cant imagine. the office commute that i was cribbing about suddenly seems insignificant in comparison. i get impatient when bangalore traffic crawls to a halt, but imagine what i felt when after an hour of cruising at 110 kmph, i get stuck in a traffic jam at a tiny town that has four rickshaws and a bullock cart, all of which were actively engaged in creating the aforementioned traffic jam? i didnt feel angry, i felt humbled, i could say. suddenly, stopping in bangalore after 2 minutes of riding at 40kmph didnt seem so bad. it teaches you to manage your thoughts, especially if you're a compulsive worrier. i'd definitely recommend a bike ride to that kind of people. there are so many new things before you that you are struggling to drink in, that you suddenly stop worrying about punctures, failures, office, relationships, mortgages, secrets... for a few moments at least, its you and the surroundings. you might be sharing the space with a thousand other people, but you feel truly alone and alive amongst the unknown around you. and everything else just fades out...

it teaches you about death as well. there is death on the roads in every direction you look. people, animals, villages, trees, towns, all dying or dead in one way or another. one of the first sights out of chennai was a couple of dead cows. followed by over thirty dead dogs on the way to bangalore. what unsettled me further was the realization that the black blotches i saw on the road wasn't tar melting under the hot tamil nad sun, it was the dried blood of hundreds of dogs, mute vitcms of civilization. in fact, my faith in civilization was all but shaken when what i thought to be a dead cow on the road north of bangalore turned out to be a dead man. some poor homeless man had been hit by a vehicle, and all that people had done was to put stones around him to prevent further collisions, and just stand around seemingly indifferent to him. my faith in myself was badly shaken as well, for i didnt stop either. at that point i was telling myself that the man was probably dead, and that i wouldnt be of any help, but later i questioned myself whether the trouble of attempting to save a homeless man was worth less than the selfish pleasure of a new years party, and i was mute to myself in answer. the scene stayed in my mind the whole trip, as it does today, and tempered my usually headstrong nature. i realized anything could spell death, a bullock cart coming in the opposite direction in the fast lane, or a single stray rod bent in the divider partition. but instead of merely fearing death, i accepted the fact that the road that carried me was running as a dividing line through the lives of so many poor people like that dead man, and that at the intersection where our lives meet, there were bound to be casualties on either side. as i (much)later talked to a friend, i ruminated on how the dead man and i ended up on different sides of the dividing line, and how easily fortunes can push me to the other side as well.

im a big picture guy. i hate to be bothered with details usually. which is where the bike journey changed my perspective again. i learned to respect the smaller stuff. be it a handful of stones on a curve in the road, or a tiny metal valve on my bike, i came to realize these small things could bring my big dreams to a halt. that hit me right in the prime of the trip, on my way from jog falls to honnavara, hurtling through the mountain twisties at extreme speeds in a bid to make it out of the mountains before the sun went down. i took a curve with my best friend riding pillion, and a bus came up around the bend and i braked hard. the rear tyre started washing out due to some gravel i hadnt seen but could now feel, and being on a lower gear i revved up for traction. the tyres bit in, i recovered, and realized what a few tiny stones couldve done to me there. and maybe it was the realization that im powerless in the face of these million small things, but i became superstitious as well. i now have a ritual in the morning where i look the bike over, start it and place a hand on it, feeling the vibrations, listening to it. if im alone i find myself talking to the bike as well. i cant communicate with the machine, nor can i claim to know if its working perfectly by placing my hand on a piece of vibrating metal or plastic, but i can sure as hell tell you that it makes me feel good about the bike, and in my eyes makes the bike more a venerable friend than a heap of japanese engineered metal and plastic that money bought.

the threads that bind me to my daily realities, my web of security, i saw it thin out right before my eyes. you go out of reach of mobile phones and gas stations, on a machine that is not infallible, ridden by two guys who are not invulnerable.. riding through a forest dirt road from goa border to dharwad, i realized how ensconced i was in this web of security. the bike was falling apart on the dirt road which was hardly more that a loose collection of rocks in some places, i was fighting for control and keeping from crashing was taking a toll on me and my pillion, tempers were frayed, we were out of reach of mobile phones and our friends or anyone, for that matter, had any idea where we were. all i could do was keep my wits about me and drive. crisis management? this makes the best management gurus look retarded. all that you hate about everyday life, all the troubles, you suddenly see that all those dont really matter. in that sense biking also clears your view of the big picture. not everyone will take the chance to see the world on two wheels, but there is no other panacea experience i can recommend. you see the threads that bind you stretch really thin, almost to snapping point. you start wishing you could break them, but know you can't, that you will be at work next monday. but you will have felt good pushing a limit.

a journey is also the best way to get to know someone. to know if what you thought of them was right, to see if they're a good friend or merely a good travelling companion. i went with a bunch of guys i've known since we were 3 feet tall. ive only grown two and a half feet since then, but our friendship has grown far more. and amongst all the strain and tribulations of such a tiring journey, i was grateful to see that this friendship could weather everything. there was friction, there was fun, and there was a collective sense of contentment at having accomplished a long journey, but its not the roadtrip im talking about. its a journey that started at 3 feet tall.

Mechanic Ramayana

Even more on biking, read at your own peril.

My mechanic is an ex-racer.

While this statement may conjure up visions of grandeur on his part, and grandeur by association on mine, things are far from such a pretty picture. And while i do admit that there is an inordinate difference in the the depth of my theoretical and practical knowledge on automobiles, and that theoretical knowledge is not of much use when your second gear refuses to engage, i also think that mechanics are highly overrated. Maybe it's because i get overwhelmed by their depth of practical knowledge and my brain switches into simpleton mode. Either way, the point is that our combined knowledge has done but scratch to improve the well being of my bike, which incidentally is my pride and joy.
Initially my contribution to this pride and joy was to keep it shining through rigorous application of spit and polish, and spend sweat and tears in keeping it serviced. and sweet fuck-all apart from that. i've said this before and i'll say it again, the first few months with a bike are a period where your feelings for it turn from love to one of invincibility. you and your bike are the a-team on the road, the one to challenge your supremacy is yet to be born. of course, you hastily correct this rather shortsighted view after your first encounter with one of the mechanic breed. The first time i needed to go to a mechanic was, yes you guessed right, after an accident. The accident itself did nothing to my feeling of invincibility except enhance it since i escaped without a scratch, but the bike wasnt so lucky and needed a mechanic. Now theoretically i could replace the headlamp assembly, but i wasn't so sure about the practical part. I was still madly in love with the bike, we were sorta like newlyweds, so me taking it apart was analogous to me performing open heart surgery on my wife, despite the fact that headlamp replacement was more suited to a nose-job analogy. Another characteristic of this situation is that you're so in love that you run around for second opinions etc., and no expense is spared to get your love back to good health. I, unfortunately, did the same.
I ran around to four mechanics asking their opinions, and predictably (in retrospect), got four different opinions. one told me i needed to replace my fork. Since that was a rather expensive proposition, he was easy to strike off my list. Another said it's ok, just change the bulb, the whole assembly is expensive, change it when u put in for more serious repairs. Of course, the urge to keep my bike shipshape meant that he was easy to cross out of the list as well. Of the remaining two, i dont recall much about their opinions, but i based my choice on the fact that one of them was a racer and the other wasn't. So i chose him to nurse my bike, and theres started my saga.

From my perspective, mechanics were put on earth to rob innocent bikers of their money. This is not specific to any mechanic, i hold this as a universal truth. The old breed of mechanics who loved your bike more than you did, dont exist anymore. The kindly old man with a boxful of tools in a dilapidated shed has been run over by the much resented march of civilization. Even service centres in villages these days have hydraulic workbenches that lift the bike to an ergonomic height, and multi purpose electric tools that change heads mechanically so the mechanic need not waste time switching from a spanner to an allen key. But this change, unfortunately, cannot be equated with a rise in quality. Your average mechanic has become more educated yet dumber, better paid yet greedier. Half the repairs on a job sheet are routinely overlooked at these places, basic thing like oil are never checked, and some of the more unscrupulous ones swipe new parts from bikes and replace them with damaged ones. And being rather naive, i was not prepared for this labyrinthine world. Multiple service stations authorised by the maker of my bike proved disappointing, and each damage hurt me and my pocket and yet never got fixed. The only consolation was that this was true for service centres of all the major bike makers.
So, with my trust in these shaken, i returned to the fold of the roadside mechanic. Sought out the racer chap again after months, and started giving the bike to him. He seems like a good man, speaks good english which is a relief since i cant make sense of Kannada, and behaves more like a racing team manager than a mechanic. Which was nice initially, since he figured with a single look at me that i ride fast and race pretty much everyone from every red light, and he started giving riding tips. And my riding definitely improved, especially cornering skills. I was elated, i began what i called 'riding on the edge of capability', noting down speedo readings at difficult corners and trying to best them the next time around. Of course, this was meant to invite more accidents, and sure enough, they happened. That's when i figured that the racing outfit he imagined to be running with me as lead driver was a GP team, to him, from an expenses point of view. And here I was, thinking of something like a SriPerumbudur track team :P Anyways, after the first crash, he gave me a list of stuff to replace. Some didnt even look relevant. When i asked him i got a lecture about racing safety, and i meekly agreed to replace them. More crashes followed though, and i became acutely aware of the fact that i might not be able to afford his services. But then, sentimental fool that i am, i had taken a liking to my 'coach' by now, and not wanting to jeopardize my racing 'career' i decided to look for alternatives. I went to a big service station again. and returned back to my mechanic just as fast, since those service station types still hadn't cleaned up their act.
But then i started having all sorts of doubts. The invincibility phase was long since over, and i knew the limits of my bike, so i decided to see the limits of the mechanic. i wanted to know if he was the kindly honest chap he came across to be. So using my theoretical knowledge i'd badger him with questions designed to trap him, yet all i accomplished was further doubt in my mind and no concrete answers either way. I started hitting below the belt and asked him to show me the parts he claimed to have replaced, which he did, yet i suspected they could have been from some other bike and that i might as well have thrown my money away. Finally, i snapped. That happened one day when i was riding to office, and the bike ground to a halt. The wheels were stuck, and wouldnt budge. Something to do with the gears i imagined. Since i wasnt too far from his shop, i took it to the mechanic. He gave me a detailed list of repairs needed, including changing shifters for my gears. he quoted about 3 grand for it, and i flipped. I gave him a piece of my mind and told him what i thought of his proposed 3 grand bill, and told him to just get it barely roadworthy at the cheapest possible price. He warned me that might lead to worse gear problems, and i told him i'll cross that bridge when i come to it. He got it done for a grand, and i rode off quite pleased with myself for having put my foot down and having saved a pile. If only i had done this earlier, i would have saved a lot more. He does good work, as i've come to know, i should just have checked him from swindling me. This thought strengthened further in my mind for the next three months, and the bike ran perfectly, as if to vindicate me.
Until i lost my second gear one day. I took it back to him, and stood there while he dismantled the engine. He showed me where the shifter had been eaten into by the gear, where gear teeth had broken off and ruined other gears. I stood there dreading an i-told-you-so speech, wishing the earth would swallow me up. Cos he did tell me all this the last time. And it cost me 6k this time. Humbled, i paid up and without a word he gave me a half-grand discount. I took the bike and made a mental note never to mess with mechanics again. Thats when he dropped the bombshell, something you'd never expect a racing manager to say. "take it easy for the next 1000km, son", he said "dont push beyond 60." My jaw was scooping dirt from the road as i drove, nay, inched back home.

Last count, i've done 81 of the 1000 prescribed kilometers. I'm never gonna make it.. aaargh.