Rattling experiences

Chennai auto-rickshaw fellows have personal driving styles that are different from that of the rest of the civilized world. The only place where the same aggression may have been witnessed would have been in chariot races in ancient Rome as portrayed by Hollywood. They drive through cracks and crannies unmindful of the number of car drivers preparing for knee replacement surgeries in the future by hitting their brakes suddenly and frequently. However, even among this crazed lot, a few stand out as genuinely insane. P and I had the honour to ride the magnificent machine of one of these.

We emerged from Spencer’s Plaza and managed to find an auto to take us to Parry’s Corner. This area has a fairly complicated mechanism for keeping the traffic under check. Suffice to say, we should have headed straight down, done a U-Turn and joined the traffic like other law abiding citizens. But Mr. Genuinely Insane was in no mood for that. He did a 90-degree turn and plunged into the traffic. P looked very flustered but I was reasonably calm. Having been reading Asimov of late, I assumed that a time bubble would open up, we would go through empty ground in a parallel universe and then emerge on the other side of the road into our universe. Sadly, we did not. Neighing like a thoroughbred, the auto caused various buses and lorries to grind to a halt on purely humanitarian grounds of not crushing us. The auto for all its rearing was not something that would win applause in the Chennai Auto Driver’s race (now banned). Like an old and elegant lady, it did not hurry obscenely but slowly strutted the road to the other side. The race between man’s willpower vs. machine’s horsepower was on.

Halfway through the journey, however the auto had warmed up sufficiently and there was no stopping her. Even at signals. Luckily we made it through most but the final one was at a large junction. Our driver, straining at every nerve looked like someone who had suffered from a major attack of constipation and still waiting for the effects of Milk of Magnesia to commence. P and I clutched each other and watched his brow furrow while deciding whether to halt. Then abruptly deciding that such intense decision making better be done after halting, he braked. We hovered uncertainly in the air for about 30 seconds. Then the clouds of doubt cleared. Quickly calculating the mass, velocity and acceleration, the auto guy decided we still had time to plunge through. Even before we landed from the hovering-in-the-air state, we were off.

Do you remember the scene in Spiderman 1 where he has to stop this oncoming train from plunging down a broken bridge? The scene shows the train rushing at Peter Parker. That is how the PTC bus looked rushing at us. At this moment, the auto concluded its own ruminations of mass, velocity and acceleration and stopped. Metal would have contacted metal but for providence. Chennai PTC buses after years of bearing 5 times the passenger capacity they were meant to bear do not accelerate from 0 to 60 kmph in 60 seconds. They grunt and groan and gently turn lest the 40 passengers hanging to the windows and doorways fall off. Our auto driver had just about enough time to reverse back to a safer point.

None of us spoke much after this. P and I were glad when we were back in the cosy confines of our office and Mr. GI was back on the road. But hey, didn’t someone say every day you need to challenge yourself to do better?

p.s. Yet another post on autos. Too bad.

Auto varuma?

One of the things that really puts me off is when people land in Chennai and launch into a litany of the problems they faced at the hands of insensitive, racist rogues who also masquerade as auto drivers. They invariably blame their inability to speak Tamil as the chief reason for being taken for a ride (ha ha. What a pun) and crib endlessly about the non-existence of auto meters in this city. I say ‘Nay, my friend, that is not true’. The reason you assume your linguistic limitation as an excuse is because you are under the merry picture that the minute you start talking in Tamil, auto drivers queue up to take you to your destination at cut throat prices. Not true. There are only two ways in which you can ensure you get a fair price

1. You are already familiar with the acceptable fare from point A to point B

2. You are around 6 ft and 90 kgs and have a steely glint in your eye

Point no. 2 is based on strict empirical evidence. One late night when I was trying to unsuccessfully find an auto using my local language skills, my bulky non-Tamil friend stopped an auto guy, fixed his eye on him and then informed him that he would be taking me to point B at XYZ fare. In less than two seconds I was seated in the auto.

Wow. Does this mean this write up is about how to do one of the two above?, you ask. Fear not. I do not for a moment suggest the futile and mindless method of mastering the knowledge of fares on all possible routes. I also assume that if the good Lord has not endowed you with the appropriate physiology, you do not plan to go for surgery or try the Jessica-Lange-in-Kingkong route of having a giant monkey following you around so that you can use intimidation as a tactic. This piece is to build a deeper understanding of the environment as I see it.

Firstly, appreciate the situation. Everybody raves about the efficient auto system in Mumbai where there is a fixed meter to tell you how much to pay. Grow up people. Chennai auto guys are much more advanced in economics than what you give them credit for. I cannot think of anyone who salutes the spirit of free enterprise more than they do. When you want liberalistion and free markets in the rest of the world, why do you shudder at the thought of your auto guy fixing his fare based on the current demand-supply situation! Mark my words when I say this is an indication of which city is likely to be the next financial capital of India, if not the world (A Big Ha to you Mumbaikars)

Secondly, the fare situation is a fairly simple Game Theory problem. Here are the situations you can possibly be faced with

a. Plenty of autos. You are the only customer around. If all these autos are parked together in a stand, leave. They are obviously a cartel and no one is going to step out of the line. Go to the main road where you can get more autos.

On the other hand, if you are on the main road and there are a lot of empty autos slowly wandering on the road, you start negotiating. Show me an auto guy who is wandering on the road and I will show you a guy who is ready to close a business deal. The first auto guy sidles up to you and quotes a fare enough to buy his vehicle. You ask him 30% of the price. If he rolls his eyes upwards and leaves, you know you quoted too low. If he sidles some more and begins to negotiate, you know you are nearer to the fair price mark. In case he has left, you can face the second auto guy armed with the knowledge of the upper and lower price bands. You will probably be on your way home by the third or fourth auto.

b. Plenty of customers One auto. Face it. The auto guy has choice. Unless he is really naïve or really wants to go to the area you are headed, it is unlikely you can get away without paying a premium

c. Plenty of customers. Plenty of autos. Shop around a bit. You usually can find a guy who is naïve or headed towards where you are going. At any rate, you discover the market price.

d. No customers. No auto. Hey, this one does not need a solution since you are already at your destination

There are of two key factors that make a difference to the situation, namely

a. time of the day – if it is pretty early or pretty late, you both need each other. Peak hours offer more choice to both of you. Anytime in between means you are down and out

b. place – if you are standing in a remote street of Madipakkam, then let us get this clear. It is a miracle there is an auto there and not a cycle rickshaw. Take it or take the bus

All clear with Economics 101? So we move on to behavioural fundas now. Remember that emotional blackmail is a key and a grossly underutilized skill that can tackle any situation. A usual one is where neither you nor your auto driver knows the way. Having fixed the price upfront, he hates having to wander around aimlessly while you get your bearings right. A uniformed customer will of course feel so guilty that by the time the third wrong turn has been taken, he/she is ready to bequeath his/her property to the auto guy as fare. The informed customer will however, at the first sign of the auto guy getting restless, glare at him and point out that being an auto guy it is assumed he will know all routes in Chennai. No auto man can handle this affront. Hell, you are practically declaring him unworthy of his trade. It is like asking your mom if she knows exactly what the word salt means (My mom knows by the way. Hi Mommy). All you need to do is to think how you can move from the defensive to the offensive at any point in time.

So with this we come to the end of fundamental principles driving (ha ha another pun) the auto fare market in Chennai. As you can see, it is economics and not Tamil that is required to take an auto in Chennai. So, next time you crib about taking an auto in Chennai, remember people think you are stupid not unfortunate.

How to drive

The first time I learnt to drive, I knew it was a hopeless task. It was too complicated. I could visualize the exact scenario when my inability to drive would come into sharp focus – after managing to give the slip to a homicidal maniac stalking us in our secluded holiday home in the forest and all the little innocent golden haired children pile into the car waiting to be driven away to safety, there I would be muttering ‘er..would any of you know how to drive?’. Embarrassment, as it turned out, came from a more mundane source. I was standing with a client at the foyer of an expensive restaurant waiting for her car to come up. She asked how I commuted to work and I nonchalantly told I took the train. She looked rather puzzled and with a faint tone of disdain asked me I did not drive. I made up my mind to learn that very day.

My dad arranged for our old driver to start my lessons and at the end of what seemed like a very long twenty days, I was technically driving. Today, atleast three people told me I drive very smoothly (aha) and it is difficult to imagine there was a time when my car would just keep going left thanks to a woeful lack of steering control. So I guess driving, like many other things, comes with learning, patience and practice. In case any of you is learning to drive in India, here is what to expect

Step 1: Getting a license. You sign up for driving lessons. At the end of it you get a driving license thanks to your driving school’s network with the RTO office. If you were really good, you would have learnt how to drive. Most people emerge with an idea of application of important car parts such as gears, clutch, accelerator, brake, rear view and side view mirrors. Most people infact stop at this stage and vaguely mutter ‘oh I know how to drive if there is not much traffic’. That is not true. You still don’t know how to drive even if it is an empty field you are driving in. Do not kid yourself.

Step 2: Getting someone to sit beside you while you actually learn how to drive. The first step is to get behind the wheel, start the car and learn how to get the car into first gear without the ignition going off. This takes enormous effort and even after you have learnt a lot of other things, this one will take a while to master. Don’t worry about it. At this stage, you still don’t have steering control i.e. your car veers towards the direction of the oncoming water lorry even though you fervently wish it weren’t. The person sitting next to you grasps the wheel often and steers you back onto the road. You are also still not adept at changing gears. Firstly you don’t remember which one is what gear. Secondly you cannot press the clutch, change the gear, hold onto the steering wheel and look at the road simultaneously. This also takes time. The best thing to remember at this stage is that you need to hit the brakes when you panic and not the accelerator. No bad situation (eg water lorry coming head on) is so bad that you cannot escape by hitting the brakes but even an OK situation can get really bad if you hit the accelerator. I got tons of practice in an empty road in the mornings where I could go from the 1st to the 2nd to the 3rd gear (never the 4th and I did not even hear about the 5th gear till the very end). No one would be around and the chances of killing myself or anyone was pretty low

Step 3: Getting better control but still not alone. Your steering control is slightly better. The person sitting beside you touches the wheel only once in a while. You are capable of changing gears after just 5 seconds of thinking about what position your gear stick should be in. At this stage, you will also be introduced to reversing which will challenge your orientation completely and entirely. I could never figure out if I had to steer right to reverse right or steer left. You also get some lessons on parking.

Step 4: Going solo. One fine day, the driver stopped the car in the middle of an empty road, got out and sat behind in the rear seat and then asked me to drive. Hands cold with terror, I managed to do ok. I was driving at about 15 km an hour, letting cycles overtake me. But I was atleast not hitting anyone on the road. You also finally learn how to hold the first gear without the car switching off. Which means you can tackle slopes.

Step 5: Really going solo. After about 20 days of all the lessons above (which could have easily extended into 40 days if I had not attempted to learn driving atleast twice in the past), I took the car out by myself with my mom as a co passenger (she does not drive). I had to wait 5 minutes before I was brave enough to attempt a U-turn to our destination. And when my dad called on the mobile to check how we were doing I went mad insisting that everybody keep quiet while I drove.

Step 6: Really really going solo. No one else in the car (which surprisingly is scarier than having a non driver in the car). I took the car to work on a Saturday. Very slowly. Then, I started driving to work in the mornings. But in the evenings the driver still had to come and get me since I was not used to night driving with all those glaring lights. This must have lasted about ten days before I finally got the courage to drive by myself at night.

Step 7: Spencer’s Plaza parking. The basement parking is stunningly steep and curving and you really need to be in good control of your car. For one reason or the other, I never got around to going there for nearly 3 months after I learnt to drive but by the time I went, I was sure I would not crash into the walls. Between Step 6 and Step 7 I had graduated from driving in non-peak hours in relatively safer roads like R.K.Salai to driving in rush hour traffic in Mount Road. I switched from taking autos most time I went out to taking the car whenever I could.

So it turned out that learning to drive was like learning English. You do your A, B, Cs first and eventually tackle Shakespeare. Just go ahead, relax and zoom away.

One morning

This morning I got into an auto rickshaw. I cannot call it just an auto. Nay, Sir. It was a mammoth version of its species, meant to carry at least 6 people and about 3 feet above the ground. Most unlike normal autos that can carry only 3 people and is usually 1 foot about the ground. Since there was no other auto and I was already running late, I got into the vehicle and we were on our way. I was perched like a washer man on his donkey, but I tried to look elegant and comfortable. Just when I was actually beginning to enjoy the view from up there, I realised an annoying sound in the background like that of a buffalo grunting continuously. After a few seconds, I realised it was the background score of my majestic auto. Clearly, today I would be the center of attraction. That would not have been such a bad thing, had it not been for the fact the auto driver decided to take the Boat Club route.

The easiest route to my friend’s house involves going through the most posh area in the city. The Boat Club area houses the rich and famous in their modest Rs 5 cr homes. This is not to say they are flashy loud people. Infact, being old money, it is an unusually quiet neighbourhood with plenty of trees lining both sides of the road and blocking the views of most houses from the road. I have noticed that except for cars, no one else uses this short cut. Mere two wheelers and three wheelers are usually discouraged by all the quiet and solemnity. And of course none of the residents drive anything less than a four-wheeler.

So there we were, ready to enter boat club. What seemed like a buffalo grunting in peak traffic now sounded like a herd of buffalos stampeding in the quiet Boat Club area.

Have you ever tried to nonchalantly sip tea in an elegant hotel that you have entered by mistake? You are obviously not dressed for the occasion and can feel the polite indifference of various elegant people in their expensive clothes. The five minute ride felt like that. In the balmy sun, there I was. People on the road craned their necks ever so gently to see this wannabe rich woman who had commanded her auto driver to parade here around the neighbourhood. The people were of course largely servants who were basking in the richness of their employers and hence were prone to be even more judgmental.

Does this matter anyway, you may ask. The answer is no. But there are some moments in life when you find yourself in a vaguely hilarious position and this sure counted as one for me.

Driving me mad

I have been driving a car successfully for the last 9 months. I knew driving in India was tough. Heck, walking in India is tough and involves constant moments of your entire life flashing before your eyes. Driving though goes to the next plane. One of the reasons is that as a car driver you are in the exclusive position of being the Loser in every possible accident situation.

Let us take the possible range of things/people you can collide with. The first obvious victim is a pedestrian. Pedestrians in India do not believe in using platforms. 'When there is a perfectly good road available, why can't I use it?' is the logic used by most. Not surprisingly over time, platforms have come to serve as places where electric transformers, phone boxes, roadside peddlers, snack vendors, beggars etc co-exist peacefully. Pedestrians also do not believe in zebra crossings, preferring to dart across the road when they spot their destination. That this may cause an oncoming vehicle to swerve suddenly and crash into a building and kill ten people is not of much consequence.

The next category closely competing with pedestrians are two wheelers and three wheelers. They follow a variation of Parkinson's laws - motorists will fill up any available space on a road. This involves making instant calculations on whether the motor bike's entire width is lesser than the 1.5 feet available between a bus and a truck on the road. More often than not, these calculations are precise to a millimeter. The 'not' is when problems arise.

With both pedestrians and smaller vehicles, the forgone conclusion is that you are a Goliath pelting Davids all over the place with your big bad capitalist attitude. The idea is that if you are driving a car, you must be rich and have the attitude of a big bad capitalist. So the public sides against you, you pay whatever money is needed to settle the issue and worry if your EMI payment on the car was lesser than that.

At the opposite ends of the spectrum are buses. The most dangerous of this lot are the public transport buses called CTCs. They are usually huge, look extremely unbalanced from years of carrying too many people and are stuffed with most of India's 1 billion population. When a bus driver knows that he is the lifeline to ease the city's transportation problem, he drives at a level 8 ft from the ground and is a government servant, he does not quite care if he dents a couple of car bumpers a day. Even during my driving lessons, I had put down CTC bus drivers as mean and unpredictable and driving next to one as the worst situation a car driver can face. At that point, however I had not seen one CTC bus overtaking another. This scene is somewhat like watching King Kong stomping through New York - beautiful but terrible.

Imagine a narrow road, which has two lanes. Now imagine a bus stop where one CTC bus is parked. The next one approaches from behind. Seeing the earlier bus, the CTC driver quickly calculates that he will have to trail behind the length of the entire narrow road. A thought that clearly causes intolerable grief. So even while the last passenger is boarding, the second CTC bus lurches in a 45 degree angle, powers full thrust ahead and regally overtakes the first one. You can usually smell the burning tyres of vehicles behind that had to brake suddenly to avoid close contact with a lurching bus. I have sometimes pulled over to admire this wonderful sight. That is infact the only way to handle the situation. If you are stupid enough to be hit by a bus, don't bother arguing with the driver for justice. He can scrunch you up like a little insect and still get away with it.

So clearly car drivers are at the bottom of the food chain. Why do we still drive? Most people, I think, love the challenge of seeing if they can get to work alive everyday. After that, anything that assails you at work can only be better. As for me - I can't think of a better place to sing aloud without inviting widespread abuse.