Mechanical Misadventures

Well, I had it coming; I was going to have to get my bike serviced. I’ve been driving it around in Delhi for the last three or four months ever since I moved back to Delhi from Pune. After a particularly hard day of driving a few days ago, my bike pretty much gave in and it was all I could do to coax it back home without breaking down. Today being the only free day I have in my schedule for this week, I forced myself to get the required work done on my bike. Going to a mechanic is not a simple issue for me, while most just put their faith in the mechanic and leave their bikes to be worked on, I don’t trust them to do a good job without supervision, so to get a servicing, I require a full free day.
Since this was the first time I was getting my bike worked on in Delhi, I was going to have to look for a mechanic. Company authorised showrooms are no good (see Original Duplicates), so I found myself looking for a regular mechanic. The one I found and settled on was a small shop, in an area full of mechanics. Unfortunately his shop was downwind of a meat shop, as a result, when I first entered the shop, it was to the accompaniment of screaming chickens being slaughtered, in an atmosphere dense with the stench of chicken faeces and rotting blood. As the wind blew, it brought with it a storm of feathers and intensified the smell. Hardly an auspicious start.
Explaining to the mechanic what it was that I wanted done was typically complex. Indian mechanics have their own dialect, half of their vocabulary is bastardised English and the rest is unintelligible Hindi. For instance a worm gear is a garare, nose pliers are plas and the muffler becomes a pungli. You would think that their lingo would be easy to pick up but the problem is, their jargon varies from one place to the other. Pungli for example is used in Pune, in Delhi, no one knows what it means (and this suits me fine because, frankly it sounds a bit obscene), garare on the other hand is used exclusively in Delhi, Pune mechanics (thankfully) still call a gear a gear. Plas are more or less universal.
Mechanics are a wide and varied bunch, while most are inept to the point of seeming retarded; some in particular are really special. I found one such special mechanic in Pune. I was really far from my usual garage (pronounced gaa-ridge) and I found that my kick (kick starter) had stopped working. Since my bike has no electric start, I was pretty much stranded. Somehow with a friends help, I got my bike started, not willing to risk the long ride back home, I decided to drop my bike off at a nearby garage that my friend claimed was very good. Entering, his large compound, the first thing that I saw was Lambretta (a classic Italian scooter) in decent condition, this got me really excited, I was thinking to myself that the guy must be a great biking enthusiast to have a classic like the Lambretta in such good condition. Inside there were hundreds of photos of his father (a veteran bike racer), with Jawas, Thunderbirds, Nortons and dozens of other classics, I really thought I had died and gone to heaven. The man himself impressed me to no end, he spent the whole evening jawing about what a great guy he was, what he’d done and how much more he knew about bikes than anyone else while two friends and I sat enraptured, listening, worshipping; silently. He had made himself out to be such a superhuman that for a while I was under he impression that he was a character straight out of Ayn Rand, Howard Roark or Hank Rearden maybe. I was actually worried about how I was going to pay him, the way he talked, I half expected him to tell me that my money was worthless to him.
The problem with my bike as he discovered was that a small lock that had broken, however since it was late in the evening, I’d have to wait till the next day till the parts-shop opened. It was pouring with rain the next day as I made my way to his shop. Once I had bought the lock, it took him about an hour to fix and re-assemble my bike. With my bike fixed, I braved the rain and drove home. On my way home, I had stopped halfway to meet some friends, standing talking them in the rain, I noticed large purple blobs floating in the water under my bike. Intrigued, I investigated further only to found that it was engine oil dripping slowly out of my bike. The bastard for all his bragging couldn’t even seal my engine properly, something even a mechanics apprentice would be able to do in his sleep with one hand tied behind his back and both legs in plaster.
I filled the engine up with cheap recycled oil and drove back, my mind in a paranoid frenzy, imagining everything that could go wrong with my bike. I could almost see the bare metal gears eating into each other, in every false neutral, every gearshift, I could hear my bikes death rattle. Fortunately though nothing went wrong that day and I made it back to his garage before any serious damage occurred. The major problems that I have faced though have been the result of the bumbling ineptitude of other mechanics; I will leave those stories for another day and another post.

College Days

As always, when I am half drunk, I began to reminisce, today’s topic of reminiscence is college. The only thing I can remember right now of college is my final Animal Tissue Culture practical exam partly because it was almost the last thing I did in college and partly because during the exam I came ever so close to disaster.
ATC for the uninitiated basically involves growing cells from animal (we used human) tissue in the lab to further use in experiments or in industrial production of a lot of important drugs. The most important factor in your technique is in maintaining sterile conditions, without which, your experiment pretty much goes to shit. So to ensure sterility we don our lab-coats, masks and the lot, pretty much standard stuff. The only difference between us and a proper lab, being that we preferred to remain barefoot rather than buying a separate pair of slippers exclusively for lab use.
The ATC lab was divided into four 2 by 5 meter cubicles with a corridor outside. Each cubicle had a glass door through which we could be observed. The cubicles were equipped with a Laminar air flow hood, basically a box close on five sides, you sit at the open end and a stream of filtered, sterile air blows at you, this theoretically ensures that all work you carry out inside is in sterile conditions. We additionally used a Bunsen Burner inside the airflow to reduce chances of contamination.
So picture this, a tiny sealed room, no air-conditioning, no fresh air, in forty-degree heat and on top of that, there is a stream of air being blown at you across a hot flame while you are wearing a thick lab coat and a mask which renders breathing normally, near impossible. Now imagine working like this for almost two hours.
On top of that, the examiner was well known for being a bit of a bastard. He looked a bit like a mummified corpse too and that was enough to scare me shitless.
For the practical, we were assigned a set of procedures to carry out to demonstrate our ability to work in the lab, apart for being judged on the actual result of the experiments, the examiner would constantly watch us, peering malevolently through the glass panes as we worked, marking us on our skill.
To start off the day, the electricity in our labs kept going and even when they had rectified the problem by laying down miles of wiring across the floor (which I inevitably tripped over), for some reason the supply to my cubicle kept going on and off. Now when the electricity goes, the airflow stops working so you have to stop work, get up and pull down the cover of the hood to maintain sterility inside.
Wouldn’t you know it, whenever the electricity went, I’d get up to pull down the cover, then suddenly the airflow would come on again. As I would sit down to resume work, there would be the examiner, staring bug-eyed into the lab, licking his chops and writing down something in his note-book. I pretty much was under the impression that he thought I was a bit of an idiot, who kept getting up, pulling the cover half way and then shoving it back. This unnerved me to such an extent that for the first half an hour I gave up work and just sat in one corner doing calculations on a piece of paper till my teacher told me to get a move on and actually do the experiment.
Once I had started though I got caught up in the flow and worked pretty well but every time that gargoyle stuck his head against the glass, I’d lose my rhythm and come close to doing something stupid.
Now working to ensure sterility is not easy unless it’s something you do on a daily basis, the intricacies are... well… too intricate to describe completely. One thing that we were required to do was to wipe down the caps of all bottles handled with an alcohol swab and then set it alight in the flame of the burner to kill all bacteria that may have settled on it.
The undead examiner had just glanced in while I was swabbing a bottle, unnerved, I set it alight, being pure alcohol, it burnt with a clear flame. Not noticing that the thing was still alight, I began to swab it again. The swab caught fire between my fingers. I threw it into one corner of the airflow, somehow managing to stifle a scream. The damn thing wouldn’t go out. If mummy-man looked in now, I knew I’d be dead so with a flick of my fingers I sent the thing to the floor. No-good, it was still happily burning away, still in clear sight of the door. Maybe because of the heat or maybe it was because of the stress, who knows; but my mind just shut down. I sat staring at the flame with horror for what seemed like an hour. I had to act. I finally got up and put it out with my bare foot. Then picked it up and threw it into the trash. As I got back into my stool, I caught him looking at me again, he knew I was upto no good but he hadn’t caught me, which was the important thing.
The rest of the practical went (in my mind) from bad to worse, with a little help from my teacher who as always managed to confuse me. Fortunately though when I came back after four days, I had a near perfect result (I still don’t know how). If I hadn’t I wouldn’t be recollecting the whole episode so eagerly would I?

Going to the Movies

Och! I be tagged by Terra Shield.

1. The last movie you saw in a theater, and current-release movie you still want to see.

That would be Pirates of the Caribbean 2. Yes. It was a long time ago but watching movies in theaters is not really my favourite way to pass time.

2. The last movie you rented/purchased for home viewing.

Omkara, an Indian adaptation of Othello by Vishal Bharadwaj, despite all the hype, it wasn’t really such a great movie. The only saving grace was the script but we know who wrote that right?

3. A movie that made you laugh out loud.

The original Pink Panther movies with Peter Sellers, damn they were funny, Steve Martin, forget it you will never be that good. I want my ‘massage’. Ha!

4. A movie that made you cry.

Umm.. ok. Crash, the bit where the paranoid shopkeeper goes after the repair guy. I pretty much lost it when I thought that he’d shot the little girl.

5. A movie that was a darling of the critics, but you didn't think lived up to the hype.

Black. A daring experiment for Indian cinema, it received both critical and box-office success. In my opinion the movie was basically crap in giftwrapping.

6. A movie you thought was better than the critics.

Pitch Black – The prequel to Chronicals of Riddick. Yes I know it starred Vin Diesel but despite that, I love fantasy/ sci-fi flicks and this was really great. I don’t know how it fared with the critics but I don’t imagine they received it with open arms.

7. Favorite animated movie

The Simpsons, I know it isn’t a movie but I haven’t watched an animated movie in ages.

8. Favorite Disney Villain.

Like I said I haven’t watched an animated movie in ages so that pretty much means I have no idea about Disney villains.

9. Favorite movie musical.

Hehe. Indians have an unfair advantage here since all Indian movies are musicals. So that means that I have to chose my favourite Indain movie, which would probably be Sholay. An Indian- western, complete with guns, horses and steam locomotives.

10. Favorite movies of all time (up to five).

a) Robin Hood - Men in tights

b) American Beauty

c) Monsoon Wedding

d) Sholay

e) Taxidriver

In turn I tag.. hmm. Lets see, Yaseer, Confusion, Jill and Nothingman

Till Death

The death penalty has been outlawed in most of the world today, however we persist with it here in India, as punishment for the rarest of rare crimes or something like that. Whatever it is, it is a punishment given to those few who have been judged to commit crimes so great, our judiciary feels that this is the only suitable punishment.
The last convict to receive die at the hangmen’s noose (that’s right, no lethal injection here) was that Dhananjay Chatterjee. Convicted of killing and then raping a young schoolgirl, he was hung slightly more than a year ago. Now as the courts begin sentencing those involved those involved in the 93’ Bombay serial blasts, I fully expect at least a few more death penalties to be handed out.
My problem is that I have serious reservations against the concept of a death penalty. Looking at it from the perspective of the relatives of victims and all others affected by a particular crime, you may feel tempted to support the death penalty. However that’s not what it is, is it? Any punishment handed out in court is not merely a court verdict; rather I see it is more as a verdict handed out by society as a whole. Although the judiciary is supposed to be impartial and unmoved by public sentiment, in the end any sentence handed out is eventually sanctioned by society. The concept of the death penalty could not exist without public approval.
My question is that, do we fully understand the implications of handing out this penalty? Or do we see it as merely the ultimate form of punishment that an individual can be subjected to.
What disturbs me about the death penalty is that it requires us as a society to lower ourselves to the level of the criminal whom we are sentencing. It’s a bit like the video piracy ads we see on TV, where a solemn faced presenter asks us; “Would you steal a book? Would you steal a car? Or would you ever steal money? Well, video piracy is also a form of theft, are you a criminal?”
This is an analogous situation, for while many of us would never actually commit murder or be part of a plot to murder, that is exactly what the death penalty is, except on a much larger scale.
My main issue is with the fact that the death penalty involves death. Life other than our own is beyond what I consider acceptable limits of our control. We can’t decide on whether someone has the right to live or not, irrespective of the lack of disregard they show for the life of others. The right to live is in my opinion such a fundamental right for humans that it cannot ever be revoked for someone, no matter what the circumstances. If you are religious than you should not support the death penalty, simply because it involves judging others to a level we humans were never intended to. It involves taking away from an individual something that is not ours to take. For atheists, it is a simple issue of humanism, again taking away what is not ours to take, reducing ourselves to the level of the very criminals that we are trying to protect ourselves against.
Once while discussing the possibility of extra-terrestrial life with someone, it was pointed out to me that any extra-terrestrial civilisation, were it sufficiently advanced to make contact with humans would be a peaceful one, one in which concepts like war and killing would be outdated. Contrast this with our visions of violent aliens, hell-bent on a ‘war of the worlds’ and you see that our fantasies are very much a product of our own conflict-ridden times. Is it surprising that our judicial system then involves elements of that which is so intrinsically part of our nature, the urge to kill.
We as a society are just not advanced or mature enough to prescribe the death penalty and should we ever mature sufficiently; we would see immediately how wrong the whole issue is.

Apology

My last post basically contained the dumb, judgmental, hateful and over-generalised point of view that I spend a lot of time criticizing. I let my personal frustration and anger get the better of me and made a dumb comment on an issue that should have been treated in a more delicate manner. I did realise it at the time, but in retrospect, i should never have put up that last post.

So to all who were offended and to to those who weren't. I'm sorry for that, won't happen again. I'm taking down the content of the post but am leaving the comments for anyone to read if they are interested.

The Pope Takes on Islam (an Illustrated Story)

*deleted*

In Pursuit of the Almighty ‘ism’

Everybody likes a good ‘ism’, don’t they? That’s why we have so many of them; Objectivism, Sophism, Hinduism, Atheism, even Christianity and Islam could be technically categorised as Christianism and Muslimism. All of these are schools of thought, belief and ways of life so what do I mean when I call them ‘isms’? The fact is that for most of us now, they imply groups rather than philosophies. I find it hard to think of Hindus as those who follow the Hindu way of life, rather I see them as part of a large group of individuals, bonded by the label; Hindu. Maybe I’m just being a bigot but I think that people like to label themselves with various ‘isms’ just for the sense of belonging that comes with being associated with a particular label.
The fact is that in our increasingly urban world, it is getting progressively easier to be alone and lonely whilst in the midst of a crowd. Additionally, I have a theory (and I’m probably wrong about this) that humans are not exactly social animals as we like to describe ourselves but we are rather tribal beings. We aren’t exactly equipped to deal with social groups on a scale found in most modern cities, we would prefer much smaller groups. It may be a result of our inability to deal with a large number of people or just our fear of differences, something that is inevitable in a large population. In large cities with mixed populations, it is common for those with something in common to settle down close to each other. For instance in Delhi areas like CR Park are full of Bengalis and Jama Masjid and Nizamuddin exist for the Muslim population. Even where there are no external forces to cause this ghettoisation, people end up accomplishing it themselves.
That is what I mean by tribal, that even within seemingly cosmopolitan cities, there exist these tiny boundaries that people erect to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’. This is where the ‘isms’ come into the picture. As a simple suffix, ‘ism’ generally implies a whole philosophy based on a few fundamental tenets, however, now I find, that ‘isms’ are used more in differentiating between people who follow different philosophies, like between Hindu and Muslim.
Our tribal urge, forces us to seek out others who hold similar beliefs and to bond with them. People will join online communities and discussion groups, not just because they want to share ides but also because they want to belong. To belong to groups that think the way they do and who believe in what they believe.
Now, for real society (as opposed to online societies), the world is growing smaller, however an unfortunate by-product of the global shrinkage is an increase in bigotry. Most of us just can’t deal with different cultures and belief systems. India for instance is in the midst of an identity crisis as a result of culture shock. Our country and culture despite the periodic invasions remains resistant to change. This time, however there is no physical invasion, rather we are experiencing what we like to call cultural colonisation. Despite raving about the benefits of multiculturalism, we defiantly oppose any cultural change of our own. Unfortunately the more persistently western cultural influences batter down on our resistance, the deeper we shrink within the shell of our own ‘isms’.
This however is a problem around the world too, nobody it seems is too comfortable dealing with other peoples ‘isms’. What I can see is that every major philosophy is eventually broken down by people into smaller and smaller ‘isms’ till what we are left with are tribes. Islam for instance is divided into the Shia and Sunni factions each hell bent on wiping-out the other.
Maybe it’s genetic, maybe somewhere far back, shrouded in the impenetrable mists of time, there existed a world where the tribe was more important than the whole species (actually there is no maybe, this was probably the case) and our tribal instincts are thus an atavism, reflecting our humble origins. Our behaviour in this regard is too universal to be considered culture specific. All human cultures share at least one common thread, that of discriminating against others different from themselves. At some time, this instinct may have served to preserve our species; it could be directly responsible for our widespread success today.
If we travelled, far back in our history to that the time of our proto-human ancestors, when the first groups were formed, more for self-preservation than out of a shared belief. When our first ‘individual’ was born, our rebel-ancestor who wanted to do something differently, maybe he liked to eat babies. The rest of the tribe would have protested this aberrant behaviour strongly and he’d have probably been clubbed him over the head for behaving weirdly. Then as the rest of the tribe hungrily tore at his limbs, ripping flesh from bone, devouring the freak, they would mentally congratulate themselves (in their own limited capacity of course) for having saved themselves from this monster. If we managed to actually see all this, we would be witness to the birth of an institution, the birth of the Almighty ‘ism’.

Face it we treat all those different from us basically as baby-eaters too don’t we?