Driving in India

There are miles to go before I sleep and there are miles to go before I sleep, these are one of the most memorable lines of Robert Frost. As with anything with modern art there are so many interpretations to everything (even the creator of the art becomes startled at times) there are many interpretations to Frost's memorable lines as well. Well if Robert Frost had been in India ,Chennai or Tnagar I can give it to you in writing that he wrote those words in sheer dread of having to travel miles in the treacherous roads. I have no doubts there.

So what / who makes our roads so treacherous? Well I have madea  small list of the demons who haunt my driving experience

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First and foremost happens to be the pedestrian.The average Indian pedestrian happens to be like the King of the Jungle. He is above all rules. He does not have to wait for a signal to cross the road, he does not have to use the pedestrian cross over bridges, he does not know the foot path. Btw the zebra crossing is not something in the zoo. The thing which makes our pedestrians above the law is the fact that if a police sargaent catches a pedestrian jumping asignal he cant exactly grab his license or RC book. This lack of vulnerability makes our common man an invincible super man whose only fear in life happens to be the Metro water lorry.

The next suspect happens to be the two wheeler drivers. I love Mani Rathnam movies, but you know he has created a nuisance with his opening sequence of his film Alaipayuthey. People think its cool to drive with music blaring from head phones. They are oblivious to the honking , shouting and cursing of their fellow pedestrians and are among the biggest headaches to the normal commuters. The other league of folks would be the ones who drive vehicles which have a displacement more than 150CC. these people think they are the direct cousins of Valentino Rossi and zip across the traffic giving many an innocent  driver a heart attack in the process.

The Comercial vehicle drivers which include call taxi wallahs , share autos and Tata ace wallahs. These men have the uncanny ability to make you feel claustrophobic, even if you are not travelling in their vehicle. See they try to squeeze through such ridiculously small spaces that people around get suffocated and give them the path to overtake.  The other really really irritating and BP raising habit of these men is their tendency to honk incessantly even when they know that there is not an inch of space to move forward.

The last but the least of the villains happen to be the Lorry drivers and bus drivers.First and foremost these people don’t have brakes. Trust me. And they never take their foot of the accelerator pedals. They are like the mad elephants. Their right of way is guaranteed. On top of it 90 pc of lorries and buses would  never passed a proper fitness inspection.

You might wonder if there is anything in the road which does not haunt me. There are 2 tyes of people who dont scare me at all. First being the folks who are new to driving (yours faithfully being one among them) . The moral degeneracy of the system is yet to catch with these people. Hence they are the absolutely law abiding citizens of the road. The other bunch of people who dont scare me happens to be the people with the ridiculously expensive limousines (Jaguars, Rolls & Bentley league).These people are mostly scared to death that someone will put a scratch on their cars. hence they are double extra careful when they drive. 

So these my friends are the villains which haunt my driving. I read a very interesting article last week in the Hindu which said that driving in india is not a test of ones driving skills, it’s a test of one’s foresight, intuition, astrology and fate. I dont think anyone can sum up driving in India in a better manner.

Rajat Gupta

I dint come across Rajat Gupta until the first time I was researching on Indian School of Business. I thought he was just another Indian born CEO of an American company, I understood his true greatness only after I joined an MNC and started to realize how difficult it will be for a minority to go to the top.

    Rajat Gupta's story is like  a script to a Tamil cinema. Poor hero who is orphaned , works hard and manages to come on top of it and wins against all odds. In the current era of the Pandits and Nooyis and half a dozen other indians heading global MNCs its very difficult to assess the true difficulty in , what i beleive to be rajat Gupta's near herculean feat. It is just like in a family , its always the first child who makes all the mistakes and his/her siblings learn from those mistakes and manage to do better. In that sense I think Rajat Gupta is like the elder brother of all those NRIs who made it big.

      For someone who was orphaned at 16 , managed to crack JEE (i guess there were no Kotas and Rammiahs back then to spoil his chances) and with absolutely no money to have got into Harvard itself is a reflection of his brilliance and grit. Then to have managed to have got into Mckinsey with zilch work experience is indeed super human. he went to become the CEO of Mckinsey , the first non US born person to have occupied that position. To get a true idea of his achievement just imagine how you will feel if a hardcore Indian company like Ashok Leyland or Reliance has a non Indian as a CEO. Frankly i will feel vexed. Its pretty much how most patriotic Americans would have felt back then when Rajat Gupta achieved that position.

     What I admire the most in him is his total insulation of his goals from what other people think. If he had thought about the people around him he would have been bogged down by fear of racial prejudice and he would have never aspired to reach the top post. In my position when I think where I will be 10 years down the line in my company I cant think beyond a particular level as I am being bogged down by realistic considerations of how much a Indian can progress in an International company.

   I think we Indians have to thank Rajat Gupta, who laid the path for us dream ambitiously and to ruthlessly work towards that dream. He also made us believe that the "glass ceiling" of our careers is in our mind and we need to break just that. What ever might be his current short comings or wrong decision calls off late he has taught us all to dream and work.

IT reflects badly on us.

2012 could not have had a worse start for Tamil Nadu. Mired by controversy, the common man is made to believe that 2012 is indeed apocalyptic. We are in the middle of a power crisis that is becoming close to an existential threat and there seems to be no credible policy decisions to improve the situation and the common man has accepted the situation with the same equanimity that he accepts everything that has to do with the government (only that we have a lot of jobs and even the reputation of the state at stake). So what has led us to this dire straits?

To start with we have policy makers who believe that an investment once made in technology is like building the Brihadeshwara temple, it can sustain itself for a 1000 years (what they forgot is that the temple was very richly endowed for its upkeep) We had very little effort , in terms of money and human effort, to modernize the electrical apparatus of the state. We have a whooping 20 % transmission loss (I read somewhere that it was 30 , im giving a very conservative estimate) . As of 2011 we have an installed power capacity of 16000MW. Which means we loose 3200 MW even before the power reaches the end consumer. So why do we have such a ridiculous transmission loss? I have not made a detailed study on this issue, but I can bet my life on the fact that we stilll use antiquated technology or equipment. The lack of investment has not only bogged down our transmission lines but also our power plants. We are way behind in terms of power generation technology. The power sector until recently has been under the complete control of the public sector. There was very little R&D in this area (for that matter any area at all, in our case the build or buy equation always seems to favor the buy option, anyways we have well wishers like IMF and World bank to fund our buys) Bottom line we follow the policy of build and forget (like the fire and forget) This has landed in this spot of bother.

Next in our root causes would be inability of our engineers to come up with out of the box solutions. The state is so accustomed to solving its electricity woes by simply buying electricity from the central grid that they cannot think of anything from that. The second tool in their kitty would be to unleash the terror of load shedding indiscriminately without any major second thoughts. I guess thats the only thing that comes to their mind when they think of Demand side management ( please read http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/tamil-nadu/article2961150.ece to get an idea of some good demand side management ideas) I had studied bit of energy conservation and management in my UG. I was told by my prof (who happens to be a part time energy consultant) that US had around 2000 (not sure of the number) demand side energy managers, in India there were hardly a handful. We often blame the lack of investment on new power plants as the reason for our problems, but the actual issue would be the lack of initiative and creative thinking on the part of our electricity engineers and managers.

The last but not the least point is we as a public dont realize that there aint no such thing as free lunch. We have been corrupted by our political system. We just want power at low cost. We dont really bother about the quality of our power. We dnt mind the voltage fluctuations which has daunted us for years. Had we protested for those fluctuations probably the system would not have suffered as much. But we only want free power, not quality power. No wonder we have landed ourselves in such a quandary.

On the whole the entire trouble badly reflects not just on the simple issue of strategic policy failure but on our mind set. We dont want to face problems until they threaten to wipe us out, we dont want to think of new solutions , we believe that good time lasts forever and last but not the least we HATE technology.

Sea side suicide

Finally managed to accomplish yet another of my suicidal (ok thats exaggerated) to-do activity, to dive into the Bay of Bengal (with a life jacket). Some genius in CTC had this amazing idea to organise mid sea dives in the Kovalam beach. My colleague Murali and I jumped on to the e-mail and enlisted for this rock crazy expedition. After an uneventful ride from my home till CEG , from where Murali hitched me a ride till Thiruvanmiyur in his dynamically unbalanced Pulsar ( Bajaj engineers need to do something about the vibration I cans still feel the tremor, pity Murali for driving it to work daily) There we met up with the other CTC folks who had enlisted for the dive. There Prabhakar offered us a lift til Kovalam . we dumped Murali's bike at the Thiruvanmiyur MRTS vehicle park and went on in Prabhakar's car.

Ill never forget the drive to Kovalam for 2 reasons. First is 2 rock crazy girls , who were a part of CTC, were riding in their Activa to Kovalam. I guess they should be thankful to have reached Kovalam in one piece. They should have collided with our car at least twice (I dunno how many such near misses they had on their way). The other was a couple of drunken dudes stopping by to make money when the group Had gathered for a head count near Kovalam. Those two fellows were talking in some highly accented english and behaved like a bunch of thugs. We folks had such a laugh after they left. Poor chaps had made fools of themselves.

We finally reached Kovalam and after parking our cars in a graveyard the group ventured towards the sea. We were provided life jackets and we boarded the fishing dinghies and made towards the sea. We expected the fishermen to take us at least a km into the sea and were quite disappointed when he stopped about 500 m from the shore. Nevertheless it dint dampen our spirits. We dived into the sea.

The time in the sea made the effort truly worth it. I felt like being in an abyss of water. The water was just throwing us around and people were drifting apart. It was initially very scary. Once i realised that the fishermen were around having an eye about for us it put all my doubts and fears to rest. I simply lay around the water enjoying the view of the horizon and the sky. It was an amazing experience. With people cracking random jokes and pulling everyone's legs (literally) it was on the whole fun.

After about 45 min the water got really bouncy. The fishermen told us that the tide was on the rise and that we must get out. We all boarded (with a good amount of difficulty) and the fishermen allowed us to jump back into the water about a few metres of the shore. We all drifted happily to the beach.

I saw a really funny thing here. I drifted to the beach and removed the life jacket. I was just watching the sea when a lady came drifting to the beach. She was unable to get up and she just kept going back and forth with the waves. It was a bit humorous for me to watch , i guess the lady would have been petrified. I pulled her out of the water the next time she drifted towards the shore. Only to be asked if I was a northie (my tamil core writhed with a sense of righteous self indignation :P ) and the next question was if I was a tambrahm (as if it was written on my face!!) Had my Don Quixote moment :P

After a nice little photo session we were on our way back home. On the way back when Prabhakar was feeling a bit sleepy it was suggested that he should smoke. Then a question raised as to who else smokes and even before I could make my reply the rest of the group declared "nee lam dhum adika maata un munjileye ezhidiruku" with such a startling unity!! man I need to go for a plastic surgery to make it less obvious to people.

On the whole an awesome trip with loads of fun.