The Third Wheel

Before I begin, I would like to clarify that this post has absolutely nothing even remotely related to relationships, so it should not be confused with that topic. Instead, this tries to deal with something even more important, the three wheeled menace – motorised and non-motorised that is found in abundance on the road.

I may be wrong, but I strongly believe that any vehicle that is fit to run on the road, and which should be legally allowed to be produced and driven, should have an even number of wheels. If you think about it, Motorcycles, Cars, Trucks, Trains, even Aircrafts normally have an even number of wheels. Any vehicle that has an odd number of wheels is unnatural and hazardous. Now, some people may argue that there have been 3 wheeled cars that have been produced, and some have been moderately successful, but they are just plain stupid. There is a theory that whatever humans produce, it evolves over time and the final stage of evolution invariably brings it closer to nature. As an example, the best material known to handle heat is Ceramic, which is what humans started using ages ago. So, if we apply a similar analogy to cars, almost all living beings that walk on the ground have an even number of limbs, whether it is 2 for humans and birds, 4 for most animals, 8 for spiders and octopi and so on. Even centipedes have an even number of limbs, and any living being that has an odd number of limbs either due to an accident or some deformity is called, by a rather insensitive term, lame.

So, based on my above theory, I have always found the three wheeled vehicles that are found on the road to be rather lame. Other than the fact that they look weird, they create a fairly hazardous environment for others on the road. Invariably, it turns out that the people who normally drive these vehicles are overly aggressive, angry, unconcerned about others on the road or traffic rules, and perpetually in a hurry. Whether they were always that way or turn into such a personality after repeated, prolonged exposure to these vehicles is a topic of contention. The two most popular three wheeled monstrosities that I will cover in this post are cycle rickshaws (henceforth referred to as rickshaws) and auto rickshaws (referred to as autos from now on) as they are the ones that I have had to contend with most often. I will try to post my experiences from two viewpoints, one as a passenger, and two as someone who has to tolerate these vehicles while using the road.

Taking Cycle Rickshaws first, these are ingeniously designed vehicles, built with the sole purpose of being bulky and with prime importance to nuisance value. The flared wheel arches on a pre-dented aluminium body coupled with the iron awning at the back ensures that proximity to these contraptions will invariably result in deep, ugly scratches on the body of your car. Comfort is an alien concept, so shock absorbers of any kind are non-existent, which ensures that if you are seated on this thing, you will definitely feel every single bump, pothole or pebble that comes across your way. Also, being an open air vehicle, you can always enjoy every single aspect of the weather that surrounds you, whether you like it or not. One of the most irritating things that you can come across while driving is when one rickshaw decides to try and overtake another. It is like a drag race taking place in super slow motion. The size of the two contenders ensures that the entire road is occupied till a winner is decided, and in case one is unfortunate enough to be stuck behind the race, it is often a reasonably long wait.

However, to be honest, I still feel that the rickshaw is a comparatively smaller menace then its mechanised brethren. I often wonder what went through the brain of the designer who conceived the idea of the auto rickshaw, because he unknowingly created the single most annoying machine for the Indian roads. Something that would account for over 63% of scratches and dents on automobiles, and prove to be the nemesis for motorists all across the country. Autos in big cities like Bombay, Delhi and Bangalore have the concept of even a single passenger meaning that it is full, which is not so in the case of the many small towns where it is the predominant mode of public transportation. The city where I grew up in proved to me that the capacity of an auto, along with human stupidity, constitute the two most common examples of things that are infinite in this universe. Any number of living creatures can be stuffed in the back seat along with their luggage. There can be up to 4 people in the front seat as well, and anyone of them could be driving the vehicle, be it the one on the left, right, center or the one who is partially hanging outside.

Of course, I have to give due credit to the person who felt that these were not a big enough nuisance and came up with the concept of a larger Auto. These aren't really popular in the bigger towns, but are quite a pain in the habitats where they thrive. These monstrosities inherit all the annoying features of their smaller brethren, compound them exponentially and thus create the single largest reason to hate the roads. Lovingly called 'Gainda' (Rhino in Hindi), these vehicles are as large as a small car and are built to be strong enough to withstand a tank shell. Contact with them is anything but pleasant.

I think there is an unwritten law that forbids autos from having working tail lights, which is why there are either empty broken sockets or thick strips of metal covering bulb-less sockets which double up as improvised bumpers. This is a very strategic move as it ensures that people driving behind an auto need to be mentally and physically alert and need to be able to anticipate the movement of the auto in order to avoid crashing into one. Another way of keeping other motorists alert is that an auto has the implicit authority to pull over whenever and wherever it pleases, in case it feels that there is a potential fare. Of course, in case you are waiting for an auto, then you will never be considered potential fare. Also, for an auto, the fact that it has three wheels which enables it to use one as a pivot and make U-turns in a very small area is considered by the drivers as a license to turn as and when they desire, regardless of the direction of traffic on that road. Of course, the way these people drive should inspire kart racers and off roaders as they can outmaneuver anything and tend to push their vehicles to the limit. Of course, people don’t really appreciate their driving and sometimes come up with innovative abuses like “Bad Idiot” to address them when they cause any sort of inconvenience.

Unfortunately, no matter how much I hate these three wheeled monstrosities that cause anguish and trauma whenever I come across them, I can’t escape the fact that they will be around for a while and that I might have to use their services from time to time. A prospect I don’t really cherish. I imagine and hope that someday, the world will only have even wheeled vehicles, the roads will be a much more pleasant place and motorists will rejoice. There will be a drastic reduction of road rage and stress and people will probably start smiling more.. I have a strong suspicion that this just might make the world greener and solve the problem of Global Warming as well.

bane (beɪn)
—n
1. A person or thing that causes misery or distress

2. A cause of harm, ruin, or death
3. A fatal poison
4. A source of persistent annoyance or exasperation

The AnT and The Computer

I got my first computer over half my current lifetime ago, on 31st March 1997. It may sound Clichéd, but the Computer actually changed my life. It had such an impact that me and my brother, both ended up becoming Computer Science Engineers. The fact that neither of us ended up in Engineering related jobs is a different matter altogether. For me the computer is an irreplaceable part of my daily life and hardly a day goes by when I do not spend time on it. I fall under the category of people who can spend upwards of 14 hours in a day in front of a computer.

My first memory with a computer is when we started having computer classes in school, back when I was in class IV. I remember having used the computer a few times before that, but for very short times. The school machine was this really primitive 386 which had 640 KB RAM and no hard disk to speak of. It ran on the 5.25’ floppy disks and was used to teach us LOGO and BASIC. DDave and Cats were the games which were played on that and people would be really excited about it. So, when I first got a PC, it was a very powerful 100MHz Pentium based machine running Windows 95 with 16 MB of RAM, a 1.2 GB hard disk and a full coloured display. It was quite a lot to handle at that point of time, but it surely got me fascinated and hooked. Thinking about it, my current cellphone (which is 3 years old) has better specifications than the 1^st computer I owned, which just goes to show the speed at which technology evolves.

It might seem unfair to say this, but my expectation of what a computer could do, and the actual outcome was very different, and in a way I was quite disappointed and disillusioned by the same. Of course, I had very unrealistic and absurd expectations, which I refuse to share, but initially it seemed quite difficult and complicated to figure out how to do things, and activities like changing the wallpaper or screensaver were amongst the more fun things that I could do. I don’t think my family ever intended for me to use the computer purely as an entertainment system, but that is how it ended up being. Even during engineering I remember uninstalling Visual C++ before my exams as I didn’t have enough space to install a new game.

The game that I got free with the computer is definitely one of the most complicated and fun games that I ever played. It took a considerable amount of time and effort for me to eventually finish it, and I don’t think I have ever faced a steeper learning curve, but I guess that is what it takes when u transition from a 6-8 key game controller to a 102 keys keyboard. Yeah, this game did not use a mouse, and I don’t think I would have been dexterous enough to handle a keyboard and a mouse simultaneously at that time.

However, in retrospect, I believe that this particular game had a considerable contribution in my developing a passion for gaming over the years. All my subsequent desktops had been configured in order to provide the best gaming experience. I was actually the only one in my batch to have a computer from the first day when I joined my Engineering College, which was totally unexpected. I used to love this machine as I had configured every single component myself and took care of it as best as I could. I actually used to lug it home during vacations so that I could play games at home, as the one at home was outdated at the time. I will not talk about games in this post though, as it warrants a completely different piece altogether.

This machine gave me countless hours of entertainment but caused a considerable amount of misery whenever it could. Once, during the transition from the second to the third year of Engineering, it decided to conk off, and I was left with a CPU in which the motherboard, RAM, Hard Disc and Graphics Card malfunctioned. In fact, if I think about it I have had multiple run ins with malfunctioning computers which seem to enjoy torturing me and making me miserable and taking away priceless data with its sadistic acts. A considerable amount of time and money had to be put in to get my machine back in shape after the epic Manipal Crash of 2006. The good thing about the crash, if I can call it that, is that I didn’t lose my data and was able to recover it by getting my old hard disc repaired. Also, the new components extended the lifespan of the machine by a few years. I won’t get into the nitty gritties of the trauma that I went through at different stages, as it will just bore everyone to death. A more disastrous crash though were the Multiple failures in Mumbai in 2009 which resulted in my losing a considerable amount of data, the most irreplaceable being the majority of photographs taken during the first year of my MBA. In fact, I have wanted to write this post for a very long time, but was just plain lazy, and one time when I had actually started working on it, my laptop crashed so it got delayed even further.

Enough complaining though, moving on, I got access to the internet back in 1999, and we were amongst the first in the city to have an internet connection at the time, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. I didn’t have any real friends who were active on the net at that time and social networking was more than half a decade away. Now, I must clarify at this point that this wasn’t a high speed internet, it was a 33.6 kbps dialup which engaged the phone when we were connected to the net, so browsing was difficult, downloading impossible. The internet eventually grew on me and later on gave me access and information about different activities that I was happy to immerse myself in. Now, the internet is like my best friend and I can spend countless hours surfing aimlessly. It is one of my main channels for information, staying in touch with friends and my only source for most of the comics that I read.

The computer is a fascinating machine and if I try to mention how it affects my life and what all I do with it, I could probably go on for ages. I think the best way to explain its utility would be that it tries to satisfy a bit of my inherent curiosity. Whether it is playing games, browsing, or just meddling with it. Fiddling around with the settings has also been quite fun, even if it led to disastrous consequences on several occasions. The biggest accolade I can give to the computer is that despite my love for cars, I decided to be a computer science engineer and not get into automobiles. I did justify that move by considering that computers are a part of automobiles, so I could probably switch later, but as things are at the moment, a career in the auto sector doesn’t seem likely.

It is strange, but I started working lately and my company very generously decided to give me a laptop, which turns out to be the worst computer that I have owned till date. I don’t want to get into the details but it isn’t the kind of machine that I would ever purchase willingly. One thing that I know for sure is that if I didn’t have access to a computer at work, I would probably not be able to last in the office for too long, and I would never really be able to pretend to show the others that I am busy. I am quite certain that amongst inanimate objects the Computer has had one of the most significant impact on my life, exceeded only by the Automobile.

com·put·er (kəm-pyōō'tər)
n.

1. A device that computes, especially a programmable electronic machine that performs high-speed mathematical or logical operations or that assembles, stores, correlates, or otherwise processes information.

2. One who computes.