Rajiv Gandhi, Vehicles and I - Part 2

I do not know whether you have learnt to drive a car in India.

It is an experience in itself.

Firstly, you approach a driving school and ask them for lessons.

Indians are kings of packages. For everything there is a package. More about that some other time.

The driving school package consists of the following:

• Allowing you into the driving school premises
• Giving you approximately ten hours of on-road practice
• Test fees etc.
• Ensuring the relevant paper-work gets completed at the RTO (Regional Transport Office) and the test goes on smoothly
  

In the last point, both 'Ensuring' and 'smoothly' are euphemisms which every Indian understands; if no, then please watch the Tamil movie 'Indian' :-))

About five years ago, I was in India on a slightly longish vacation. Since driving cars was not one of my core skills, I had decided to acquire the same. Now, if I was really serious about it, I would have gone about learning to drive a car in Singapore itself - where it costs about $3000 and anything between 3-6 months to achieve the same. [I have heard of people hosting parties after they get a driving licence; I can understand that!]

Well, I was more interested in the shortcuts and decided to give it a go in Chennai at a fraction of the cost of doing it in Singapore.

Onward march!

Step 1: Approach the driving school. Tick.
Step 2: Learn to drive. Half-Tick.
(I was learning to drive on the ubiquitous Maruti 800; whenever there was a turn or change of fictitious-lane, I used the indicators, much to the chagrin of my instructor; he kept chastising me saying that it will confuse other drivers if I use the indicator signals instead of hand signals!!!! I was having self-doubts on whether it was a right decision to have chosen to learn driving in India. But then hind-sight is 20/20)
Step 3: Go for testing.

Here my second tryst with Rajiv Gandhi unfolded. If you know what happens on a testing day, jump to the section titled BLISS below ;-)




The testing scene goes something like this...

• You reach the RTO in the morning of the designated day with a few butterflies in the stomach.
• Then you wait until noon or sometimes till the evening.
• Your driving school agent will be waiting with a bundle of applications belonging to various 'students' who are to undergo the test that day.
• The testing inspector will condescend to test the students according to his whim and fancy.

There will be several such officers and when they appear at the testing site, there will be a group of agents running after them to impress upon them to get their students tested first. Well, the testing site is nothing but a secluded street or a discarded ground. Don't even think of any traffic signs at the test site. If the normal roads do not have any proper signs, why should the test sites have them???

Eventually, four students and the tester will get into a car - provided by the driving school where you 'learnt' from. Typically, each student will be asked to drive for about 50m on a straight road. If you are unlucky, you might have to do a right turn or a left turn - only hand signals, no indicators, please. At the end of this charade, the tester will get down and utter some loud banalities such as 'None of the students know how to drive' or 'What did you teach them? To drive a bullock-cart, perhaps?', to the agent.

Immediately, the agent will go on the defensive and will assume a very suppliant role and try to suffix each word with a 'Sir'.

After about an hour of such agony, the agent will vanish into the cavernous RTO building and will not return until it is late in the evening.



He will then beckon each student and get us to take photograps, sign documents and at the end of it all, hand you a small credit-card sized laminated photo ID called driving licence!

BLISS!!

Everything went well until the start of the testing.

As soon as the tester saw me, he pulled the agent aside and whispered something into his ears. I looked down at myself and was convinced that I did not show any signs of being a Non-Resident Indian. Regular tee-shirt, regular trousers, bathroom slippers - probably that was a mistake; other students had shoes on! But then that must be fine, I was thinking.

The agent after a reasonably long discussion with the tester, came back diffidently and asked me what the problem was with my left eye. That is it! Am I going to be rejected because of a stupid physical deformity which has no bearing on my seeing ability?

I told the agent that there was nothing wrong with my eye and I could see as well as others although with the help of very mildly powered glasses. I decided that it will be better to talk to the main guy himself and approached the tester and asked him what the problem was. For a tall and well-built man, he was acting mildly, almost as if he was afraid of me. He requested me kindly to go and get a certificate from a registered medical practitioner (that is a doctor from the Government hospital, you see) saying that my eyes are good.

Now this is a bombshell! This is not the established process at the RTO! There is something wrong here. I spoke to the agent and even offered a generous tip to ensure smoothness of transaction. His eyes gleamed a bit and he went into another conference with the tester. I could snatch a few words like 'IT', 'Singapore' etc. I was reasonably confident that things could be handled now.

Presently the agent returned and he was not a happy man. The tester insists on the certificate !!!&(@*&#(

I had no choice but to rush out and spend another half-a-day to get the required certificate, only to be told that I could be tested only the next day.
Bad karma? Perhaps.

Next day, the tester scrutinized my certificate thoroughly and again looked at my face and eyes for a long time, before agreeing to test me reluctantly. And like how he tested?!!
Instead of the 50m course, I was made to drive almost a kilometre with various gear changes, right and left turns, reverses - almost everything except the three-point turn (Thank God! That would have killed me.)

When we returned to our starting point, the agent was a completely lost man. He was twisting with anxiety and asked me to give the details. When I told him about what happened, he was absolutely incredulous. He kept repeating, 'He is not like that at all!'.

To cut a long story short, I got the driver's licence in the evening, one day late and with the additional knowledge that I well and truly passed the test!

Later in the evening, when I was buttonholing the agent about the fact that he has to pay me some money, now that I really (!) passed the test and that the entire operation was nothing but smooth, he shared a piece of news which he had evidently gleaned from the RTO grapevine:

Apparently, the testing inspector assigned to me was the same guy, who in 1990/91 had 'tested' and 'approved' the driving licence of Sivarasan - the One-Eyed Jack.
Advantages (?) of having one bad eye!!!  
Bad karma? Indeed.

In the investigations that ensued after Rajiv's death, he had to go through hell of an inquiry and just escaped a conviction!

I understood the guy's problem. As soon as he saw me, all the ghosts (no pun intended) of the past would have danced in front of his two good eyes. Hence his request for the certificate, additional testing [so that nobody can blame him for dereliction of duty later] etc. CYA at its best!

I am not sure whether the grape-vine was true or not. But I did go through the experience.

P.S. Incidentally, I have not driven any car for any distance, however small since that day. All the trouble for nothing!!!

Rajiv Gandhi, Vehicles and I - Part 1

Read this article this morning.

After 15 years of the dastardly act, the LTTE has accepted the responsibility for assassinating Mr Rajiv Gandhi. It has also issued a public apology for the same and hoped to improve the ties between India and the LTTE. This comes hot on the heels of the EU ban of LTTE and the increased Sri Lankan Government's military action (and a purported military understanding between Indian and Sri Lankan governments).

But then, this blog is not to discuss who is right and who is wrong in this sad episode of South Asian history. In fact, as my son would like to ask, "Who started it first?" A typical answer could be a Nayagan-like "Enakku Theriyaleye!" ("I don't know!")
This post is more to narrate you the first of two comical situations that I had to face which were related to Rajiv Gandhi's assassination.

It was August 1991. I was just out of college and had joined this great multi-national software firm in Bangalore to develop software handling 'debits and credits' while until a few months ago, I was busy counting 'bits and bytes, electrons and neutrons' in the applied electronics course.

Well, Bangalore as you all know was great in those days. Very cool - literally and figuratively. I hear that it is chaotic nowadays - but then I have not been there for almost six years! Such is life!!!

We were lodging in a company accommodation in Jal Vayu Vihar - JVV (for those of you who are not familiar with Bangalore, JVV is one of the first set of apartment blocks which used to look like castles with their harsh unpolished granite outer walls, but great interiors). The place was about 5 km from MG Road and the only way to commute was by your two-wheeler.

I had a faithful TVS Champ (a 50-cc moped), which I used to call as Snoopy.

Snoopy was registered in Tamil Nadu - my home state. In India, if you move to a different state you have to re-register that vehicle and get a different number etc. But then this can be a hastle and you do not want to meddle with bureaucracy in any country - specifically in India. So I was running around in Bangalore on Snoopy with a Tamil Nadu registration number. Of course, if you get caught by the traffic policeman, he would take the obligatory 20-rupee note and let you drive away. [I believe that the numbers have changed but the process is still the same :-]

Fast-forward to action date....

On a Sunday, I was returning back to JVV in the late afternoon, after a hefty meal in one of the MG Road restaurants [Santrupti perhaps?].

Just as I was nearing JVV hoping to catch a nice little nap, a 'mama' (a traffic policeman affectionately called so in Tamil) appeared from nowhere and signalled me to stop.

As a true Indian, who has this great fear psychosis on seeing anything that borders on authority, I stopped immediately, almost whipping out my purse to lose a twenty.

It is worth repeating what transpired then...

TP (Traffic Policeman): Enu idhu TN (tamil nadu) registration-a? (What is this? Tamil Nadu Registration vehicle?)
Me: Avudhu. (yes)TP: Licence Idhiya? (Do you have a licence?)
Me: Illa-ri. Maney nalli idhey (No sir. It is at home.)

Here I have to digress: Guys don't even think that I could speak so much Kannada in two months; mine was as pidgin as it could get; I was the guy who went to a fruit seller and asked 'Baley Hennu' instead of 'Baley Hannu'; Incidentally Hennu means girl/woman in Kannada and I don't even want to know what the fruit-seller understood - he did give me a crazy look ;-)
TP: RC book?
Me: Same as above.
TP: Enu kalasa? (what is your job?)
Me: Citicorp Software
TP: City Corporation-a?

By now, my right hand had already reached the back-pocket of the trousers to extract the purse and the panacea - twenty rupee note. But then our man turned out to be a Holmes. He threw a real googly.

TP: Chashma thagade bidu (remove your glasses)
Me: huh? (I could not understand what he was trying to say)
TP: Chashma... Chashma (signed me to remove my glasses)
Me: (removed my glasses)... still could not understand what he was trying to drive at...

Now the TP looked at my face and eyes with great interest for about ten to fifteen seconds and asked me to get down from my vehicle. I was still confused. Got down from the vehicle and pulled it to the side of the road.

I was trying my pidgin Kannada to ascertain what was running through his mind and he kept repeating: "Neevu Inspector meet maada beku..." (You have to meet the inspector)

Murkier and murkier.

You don't go about talking to traffic inspector for having an other-state registration, do you?

Then the officious looking traffic inspector (TI) materialized after about 15 minutes.
He walked up to me and repeated the same questions above in pidgin English... thank God for such small mercies!

After another round of facial inspection (I wish I had shaved that morning :)), he threw another googly at me:

TI: Is your mother tongue Tamil?
Me: Duh! Yes.
TI: Have you been to Sri Lanka before?
Me: Huh? Never.

It was when it struck me.
You see, I have a problem.

I was born with congenital ptosis condition; for the medically uninitiated it is called the droopy eyelid syndrome. Now added to that there was a bit of 'lazy eye' situation - all on the left eye. It was corrected via plastic surgery sometime in 1982 but what God giveth, you can only alter that much. So, a casual onlooker will still wonder what is wrong with my left eye.

Round about that time in history, there was this guy Sivarasan, who was the master-mind behind the heinous act of Rajiv assassination. He was killed in an encounter in a Bangalorean suburb sometime right after the assasination. The guy was supposed to have had only one eye - and hence his sobriquet One Eyed Jack.

These poor TI and TP were probably doing their job much too zealously; they must have thought that Sivarasan had actually escaped the encounter and now they have caught him again; promotions and rewards must have danced in front of their eyes when they saw me !

Immediately, I went on a big defence of telling the inspector of how I am an important computer (sic) professional with an important company - handing in my business card to him.

He looked at it once and then his manner mellowed down a bit; what is it with the business cards? They don't even have your photograph!!

I laid it thick by asking him to send his subordinate with me to JVV and check the documents. This brightened him a bit and he ordered the TP to go with me and check the documents. The TP climbed on to Snoopy reluctantly - he was seeing the promotion and awards slipping and probably he was going to be richer by the twenty at best!

After a few metres of travelling, the TI yelled at us and asked us to stop. He called us back and told the TP something in Kasturi Kannada which went way above my head. He then nodded at me and asked me to go; but only after sternly warning me not to travel without my documents thereafter!

The last leg of that journey to JVV was the shortest and fastest that I had ever done. Needless to say, the copies of documents were with me always ever since. I think that was the only time that I escaped the brush with the police, without any associated lightening of the purse :-)

Elementary My Dear, After all it is life!!

For sometime now, I have been wondering about the senior citizens and their insatiable drive to do things.
I would like to narrate at least three examples of 'Perisu' doing things which only made me envious of them.

There is Mr Subra - the youngest old-man of Singapore cricket. Here is a guy who has been involved in cricket since independence - Indian Independence that is - been playing, umpiring, scoring, administering, scolding, admonishing, praising, fighting, clowning with cricket for all these years. Of course, he is a retired teacher and that could be seen in all his correspondence... pedagogy at its best.
Until recently, for years together he had been running the Singapore Cricket Association's (SCA) website (http://www.cricket.org.sg) and ensured that it was up-to-date in all aspects. As if it was not enough, he was the administrative manager of the SCA before he decided to take it easy at the ripe-young age of 76!
Oh, by the way, the old ticker inside has not been behaving well for the past few years, but who cares?
But it does not stop there... Recently has taken to that crazy 9x9 game Su-Do-Ku (http://www.sudoku.com/). He probably became so good that he qualified for the nation-wide age-group finals crunching those numbers.

Then there is my friend's mom.
The lion-hearted lady in her late sixties, has taken to adding credits on her spiritual side of the life-ledger and for that she found the best way was to learn Sanskrit and recite the Vedas/Gita/other Hindu scriptures in the divine language; not just chanting - but to understand what she is chanting.

A small digression here: I have found the teachers of Hindu scriptures to be uniformly of one type nowadays. They insist on you to learn the chanting of the various works. If you chant properly, the aural vibrations will do good to you and your surroundings and your family and the world etc etc.. But having been brought up to question everything's logic, the immediate reaction is - what is the meaning of this sentence or word? How does this praise the Lord? What are the lessons that I can learn by understanding the meaning of the scriptures? The questions are countless. Answers not forthcoming. Not to much avail.
THOU SHALL LEARN TO RECITE FIRST; THOU SHALL NOT NOT ASK QUESTIONS.

Coming back to the story, what does she do?

She goes and learns Sanskrit.

With a great devotion (to the Almighty and to learn the language), she is said to have mastered the language now and is able to converse fluently with her friends and teachers - much to the chagrin of my friend who has to either speak to her in Tamil or in Hindi (yuck!) or in English (yuckier!!)

Of course, there is the small matter of her suffering from this eye condition called Retinitis Pigmentosa (Affecting night and peripheral vision; 'Maalai Kann' in Tamil) for many years now. And recently, the doctors have certified her as 'legally blind' meaning that she can get assistance due to her handicap - don't want to go there further. But you get the drift, I suppose.

Next is my father-in-law. (I know that I will get a lot of points at home for this particular section - no inner motives for putting this here!)
After retiring from civil service in India, he also took to the spiritual side and has been involved so heavily in the related activities that he is busier than he used to be when he was in service! Of course, old age brings its own share of ailments... but he told the doctor, "Don't worry, Doctor. I will be alright. I know how to get things under control!" While a majority of us are looking at the doctor for succor for anything and everything, here is this guy comforting the doc who was a bit blue after seeing his patient's (?) sugar readings.
Foolhardy? Perhaps. Positive Attitude? Definitely.

The list is definitely endless.

Senior citizens are perennially worried about a few things:

• Health [BP, sugar, heart, loss of memory, medicines - oh! they are the best... medicines have replaced food for break fast, lunch and dinner; my dad cleans up 25 a day and mum about 15!
• Money [when they need not !]
• TV serials and their characters [Sorgam and Nimmathi on Sun TV are the best!!!] I can understand your sympathy here :-))
  

For every such senior citizen out there, there is at least one, if not more, who decide that enough is enough!

Let me go and grab what I have missed all along. I have to live this life for myself!


Be it the missed temple, the odd concert, the trashy movie, long-lost friends, help-the-needy, the hidden book, the exciting Dhoni innings... they are there everywhere enjoying every bit of it!

I have a manager who has this great positive attitude about jobs - My dear! After all it is a job!

The true understanding of this axiom puts you in the unique position of running the job to the best of your ability and still enjoy it. The moment, the job becomes enjoyable, the entire battle is won!!! Mind you it is not half-the-battle, the ENTIRE BATTLE!

I have to say that the senior citizen sample above and all those millions who are not mentioned here possess that unique brand of positive attitude:

AFTER ALL IT IS LIFE!!!

Keep running guys! We are proud of you and will try to emulate you as best as we can when we reach that station!!!