statesman house vs. shivajinagar

it has long been maintained by authorities more knowledgeable than me that the only two gharanas of biriyani are the lucknowi and the hyderabadi. and that if all the rest of indian civilisation went to pot, we would still have justified our existance by having invented biriyani. there has to be a little aside at this point, were i make my personal claim that the only people who know how to make a perfect roganjosh are kashmiri muslims. just the way an ilishmachher jhol attempted by anyone who is not a Sen, Ghosh, Ganguly, Bhattacharya, Mukherjee, etc is doomed to failure, the perfect biriyani is best left to the people who have had centuries of institutional experience making it. a digression into the rather innovative calcutta biriyani which somehow transcends mere biriyanis, but then, its not a classic biriyani. in fact, if the pun involved were not so ridiculous, i would have said that the calcutta biriyani is not kosher!!


statesman house: this building near chouringhee you can walk to either from the esplanade, or in our case, on a bunk from college from presidency. kinjal, my esteemed friend is the bloke who knows the ins and outs of calcutta in a way that i do not know. yet. so we walked to the statesman house. where we, impoverished and hungry(this was during my second year in college, when most people experience of leftist revival) stumbled into a roadside dokan which smelled like heaven. beef biriyani in its best form, with a dash of achar(pickle). rubbing shoulders with wannabe journalists dreaming about copy which will sell(statesman house), random dalals("take, take, take, no take to no take, one time to see!") and people employed by random dalals(still trying to equate the city to their mental idea of the chhapra zila, "chhapra zila mein gharwa, to kaun cheez ka darwa?"). the best biriyani i ever had in the holy city. aminia and sabir didnt come close. forget bedwin, bawarchi and the johnny come latelys hich are springing up near colleges in south calcutta. ok,, so my grandma used to make some awesome biriyani, but it wasnt kosher!!!!!


bangalore: three years later. me and debuda hunting shivajinagar for plastic wine glasses. why? cos when jonathan brewster is about to drink elderberry wine from the wine glass, someone comes in and he drops it. or something to that effect. noone had ever seen or heard of elderberry wine before, but we assumed that at thirty feet, the audience wouldnt know the difference between elderberry wine and grape juice from the chowdeswari juice centre. and buri(inspector rathod) had threatened to do nasty things to debuda and me if plastic wine glasses were not forthcoming. so here we were, hunting through the shivajinagar market where on a thursday afternoon, you are likely to hear english, kannada, hindi, tamil, malayalam and the two of us speaking bangla. its fun, everyone curses everyone, and no one seems to mind. until then, i had dismissed bangalore as a hopeless land of vegetarians where rasam was the best substitute for food. till we smelled something, from this somewhat hidden alley. almost like it was an entrance into the magical world. the gazes of the folk walking back and forth seemed to just slide off it. with a cry of "fire burn and cauldron bubble!!!!!" we leapt into the alley.(ok, i just made that up). halfway through, we were stopped by a bunch of rather huge, ill tempered goats. a quick correlation analysis said: livestock-smells-ahaha! we edged our way by the goats and walked down. we eventually reached this shop where for the minor sum of 10 Rs, we could have a whole plate of sheekh kabab or masala kabab or biriyani. negotiations with the stallowners involved us talking in bangla and hindi and him replying in kannada and ultimately hand gestures won the day. we sat down to kabab of the kind which is not served in random expensive places. you have to go there, forget about hygene and all that. and take your own water bottle. and then finish with a up of sweet tea at the stall at the corner of the market, near the bus stop, with a classic mild shared between us.

attack of the insane idli

who sez that we are the only sentient beings on this planet? i mean, fine everyone from unnamed hindu philosophers to doug adams have pondered about this, but has anyone thought about idlis? the life cycle of a typical southie revolves around the worship of the idli, and its equally inscrutable brethren, the dosa. there are minor deities like sambhar, chutney and rasam which are equally inescapable. so if you have had the fortune to actually observe a genuine tam-brahm dip his(or her) idli into the little bowl of sambhar at approximately that hour when we are struggling with our last dream, you have seen a miracle happen. that is their weakest moment. the ideal time to ask them to cough up a couple of hundred rupees, lend you their scooties and perhaps to pop the question is right when they are contemplating the essential unity of idly and sambhar, the earth and the skies, the soul and the universe.... so the question would be phrased as.. "care to have idlis with me for every morning after this?"... a question, which, i am sure, will bring eternal happiness. and if it doesn't, what the heck, you can go back to chhole bature!!

maths and me

most physicists have a love and hate attitude towards maths. we love it when we get it right, and we hate it when we dont. the anecdotes regarding us and maths and mathematicians are endless and entirely unfunny, except, of course to we of the befuddled thought processes.
once upon a time, back home, in the land of the true believers, one prasad sengupta, a truly talented faculty in our dept was perspiring over the solution of laplace's equation in some hideous geometry. after about two boardfuls, all of us sweating(summer in calcutta) and some of us rendered somnolent tends to comatose by the scratch of chalk and the regular click click click of the rather inadequate fan, he turned to us and proclaimed "lost in a jungle of algebra". words that i remember with laughter and some tears(laplace's equation, is, under thebest of circumstances, a beast).

so, here i am, trying to put together product operators for the last answer to a hw. and product operators have an alarming habit of inflating under each pulse or time evolution. if one keeps track of the signs and the sines and the cosines faithfully,, one will not go wrong, but then one does. and then retracing the path followed by half a page of math is approximatly as tricky as negotiating your way out of a south american temple while the wals are begining to crumble around you.

another thing that only the foolish, the masochistic and the supremely confident attempt is to solve problems for the general case, and then plug in values and get answers. i leave it to your imagination as to what i am. but the sheer joy of seeing all the terms collapse into the one ypou expect is the highest level of happiness that a mathematically challenged individual like me can ever hope to achieve. its like seeing the beast collapse; maybe it was a lucky shot, but who cares!!!!!!

the width of the internet

there are moments in life when i feel mathematically challenged. which is a rather common state for a person who puports to be a physics student. but i am not talking about being mathematically challenged while trying to balance my expenses at the end of the month(that is a hopeless task, somewhat on the scale of enforcing peace in certain parts of the world where people try to enforce peace, or like explaining the concept of "work culture" to certain members of that class of parasites known as "homo politicianus" back home), but while thinking about random problem which crop up in life. take this statement made by a friend of mine(name avik). sorry statements: "you can navigate from anysite on the internet to any other by just twelve clicks and you can navigate from any site to a porn site in six clicks". now how do i check the veracity of these statements. one must, you do realise, i hope. there are quite a few interesting phds in network theory here, if one is interested. and if one is willing to risk the possibility of total insanity as a result of trying to check these statements, the experiments themselves should be interesting indeed. and when one got bored, one could write a simple code to start at a designated website and automatically click at random points and then trace the navigation history. should be good work. i have copyright. any filially challenged individuals(read bastards) who steal my idea will suffer the consequences of being eternally cursed.

much obliged

the last time i was badly clautrophobic was about a hundred years ago when i had locked myself in the cupboard. so this is what happened today morning. Y and i were dragging a cart with some stuff upstairs and chose, entirely by happenstance the oldest lift in the building. and halfway up, it stopped moving, the door came slightly open and there were strange creaking noises. we were slightly unsettled. so i called the emergency services, and they said that someone will be over. then the lift started moving down in small jerky steps. we were more than slightly unsettled at this point. i mean, being stuck in a lift is not terrible. there are things you can do, like count all the prime numbers slowly, stare at your fingernails, write that louvv letter which you should have sent, compose your own cenotaph, if you have pen and paper to write on it "I have just proved the Riemann Hypothesis but there isnt enough space to write it down". or something. i might stick with or something.

insert finger here

from the crashes the system shall be woken
a light from the shadows shall spring
renewed shall be keyboard that was broken
the crownless again shall be king

public speaking

there is something about standing up and speaking to people with a powerpoint or something which fills me with unease. a feeling of total dread would be better. that way you know where to look. this vague, undefined feeling of messing up is not too good. anyway, so i had to give a talk this thursday. and as expected, i realised that i had to on tuesday. thats me, brilliantly organised and all in place. but i got the powerpoint in time, hating myself for not using prosper like i should. but prosper is like biriyani, takes a lot of time, and usually gives great results. and it is based on tex. and i ended up more or less enunciating clearly, but not quite speaking like i usually do. and i have to thank the audience for not tearing into me. i know that people at iisc would not have been so nice. after unprepared talks, the speaker's friends are usually called in for the last rites. so i lived and walked through somewhat chastened. the next one will be better.

three wishes

three wishes for the day:
1. world peace.
2. a stable 20GHz cryomagnet with amazing field stability and some ultrafast electronics to go with it.
2a. a three qubit weakly coupled loheteronuclear labelled molecule.
3. ilish machh!!! lots of it! with shorshe baata!! and maybe posto to go with it. and shukto. on second thoughts, its probably more feasible to just wish for a cure to cancer.

yes, it been tooooooo long since i have had a proper bangali khawadawa, and that is just too bad. i would give quite a lot to be able to browse the garia bazaar right now instead of buying lousy frozen stuff from the supermarket. at a pinch, i would even settle for the yeshwantpur market on a sunday morning. even though i maintain that the southies have been long deprived of taste buds, they are being slowly educated in such matters by us bongs, and the current state of bangalore is a tribute to that. so there!!

its a beeeeautiful day

and it is indeed, the snow has politely stayed off for a while, the temp has climbed rather tentatively into the late thirties and the early forties(shit, i am going farenheit these days) and the windchill isnt bent on murdering me, atleast not just yet.. a wonderful day, and i am in the lab grading stuff. there is a deeper message here, but i am too tired to record it here....

bad movies

there are good movies, there are bad movies, and there are some movies which never should have seen the light of theday, but for some reason found there way out there. and there is a good reason why these movies exist. to create a baseline. everyone knows that for comparisons, we need a standard frame of reference. this reference frame is provided by such abysmal movies. so, we were tired and bored and decided to watch some tv(sound familiar?), and we ended up seeing a truly disgusting movie about a plane crashing in a swamp because some hijackers insisted that the pilot fly to their destination thru a storm, and the colpit wanted to be a hero, and got shot, and the bullet passed straight through him and messed up the cockpit console and then they crashed, and then they were chased by a bunch of angry crocodiles. meanwhile the boyfriend of one of the wimmen on the plane(i am not sure whether it was the blonde airhostess or the other one, cos they killed off all the other wimmen early on) gets into a rage at these random events which are keeping him from his girl, and hires a tracker who magiks a chopper from under the bar and they go tracking. we are treated to some scenes in which a clearly plastic croc is towed/pushed by extras(just out of the field of view of the camera) and at one point is "nuzzling" the bloke. the tracker is a typical wannabe Hemingwayish hero crossed with a special forces washout. the croc is plastic. the dialogues are braindead, the camera work is awful. as you observe, not the best of movies to see.

the mind of a grad student

disconnected thoughts of a grad student:
awful life... food.. food. report to boss..... homework.. HOMEWORK! teaching (wyaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!) cold .. blinking cold.... my friends have jobs.. regular jobs... paying jobs... i am a grad student.... food.... food.. food...... hate my life... beer beer BEER! friday night==beer. no... friday night==homework.... when was the last time i saw the inside of a movie theatre?.... the last ice age perhaps.... oh, check the simulation.. still crunching away? ok, keep at it. u and me, old boy (now talking to computer, coworkers observe subject mumbling, view this as a sign of mental disintegration, are somewhat correct)... just like the old times... imagine being good friends with a computer.. yech! density matrices playing kabbaddi with rotation matrices on a meadow with a river flowing thru it.. a river filled with katla, rui, ilish and other suchlike... naah, i should have got a callcentre job like every other arse back home.... on second thoughts... this is fun..

somewhere, half a world away
the darkness is lifting
as a reluctant january sun makes his way up
and yawns his way to work
sleeps mothers coming home,
their children, sleepier still,
herded into classrooms by their teachers,
the morning section at south point.
the rick-wallahs puffing away
the last beedi for a while
bhodroloks rubbing shoulders
minor skirmishes over the freshest katla
and the bhodromohilas win, as always
for a while yet, that rarest of sights:
gariahat junction, almost empty
doesn't last for long, though.
the city is waking up.

spaceships

lights and shadows danced solemnly across the fuselage of the giant.. pomfret. that was the only shape which came to mind when one looked at the 137. it was a source of tremendous personal pleasure to kranti that the russians who had designed it, the americans who had contracted it, the chinese who had actually won the outsourcing contract and had built most of it and the indians who had written the code(and painted the funky ethnic murals on the outside) could not agree on a common name for the greatest spaceship ever built, one that had ruined half the world's economy (of course the half of the worlds's economy belonged to the half which didn't sit in on economic summits, so it didn't matter anyway). anyway, the spaceship had been built in this last decade of the 21st century and had been sent onn a secret mission. so secret, in fact, that CNN gave it time on primetime news displacing the latest peccadilios of the chairman of the council of nations. (something to do with his secretary, an impossibly buxom lady of otherwise rather dubitable virtues, although the aforementioned chairman kept babbling about the coffee she made. aparently,, in this age, we still need ahem.. ladies, of, uh. impressive dimensions for making coffee..). where was I, ah,, yes, the mission. we had received a message, you see, on the Hydrogen line(1420.45 MHz). This message had come somewhat out of the blue one ordinary morning as an intense collimated beam aimed directly at earth. this beam had originated from somewhere in the vicinity of pluto. the message had, as per actual records caused one burnt egg(belonging to a grad student), a fantastic thesis(the same grad student) and a fatal heart attack(his advisor). it also caused the ship to be built, its rather controvorsial christening as the "137", its launch with the most highly trained crew of astronauts ever(not a single man amongst them) and now, four years and five billion kilometres later, here we were, loitering near the Lagrange point between pluto and his moon, the charon.

the preliminary exploration had gone well, so well, in fact that we had taken a short break just to sit back and let the bigwigs contemplate the magnitude of what we had achieved. the biggies did the sitting back, we scurried like so many ants across the ship and through the myriad service tunnels making sure that no AO unit gave out on us.


bridge:
"outlook 1 to bridge, outlook 1 to bridge, we found something". the watch cleared the hollywood breakup story she was immersed in as captains narya and mehak walked in. (detailed studies had shown that one male commander was 13.56 times more likely to do a harakiri with his ship than two female commanders, so.... incidentally, the results of tests with two male commanders were never made public.) "what is it, outlook?" mehak asked. amazing how she always managed to look like the uniform had been starched with her inside, the watch wondered as mehak slid quickly into the con seat. narya was viewing the tapes of the last half hour at 4X, a speed that made the wath slightly dizzy. "looks like a .. device ma'am". the screen filled with the image of the disc. "perfect". that was the thought that entered her head as she focussed on the pitograms. a man and a woman, side by side. and the man was .. perfect. ok, so was the woman. and those rulings by the side? what about them? mehak had fought long and hard for this job. and it finally looked like she had won.


earth:
"those numbers indicate the azimuthal angle, the perpendicular distance from the galactic plane and the radial distance from the perpendicular: in short the euclidean coordinates of planet earth, and those numbers indicate the same for what we think is the host planet. the numbers near the centre of the disc indicate a frequency, just slightly off the Hydrogen line and scheme of polarisation modulation, which we believe transmits data to the disc. Lights". the hall was illuminated with the harsh white fluoroscent lighting which universities seem to think promote learning as people came awake. the man from the council was almost aggressively awake:"so you are telling us that this .. disc is a .. communication device. a telephone?" Rafik, the astro man, typicaly in a coffee stained shirt and what looked like a secondhand jacket with crow goo n it looked up from his slides and said, "basically, yes. we can transmit voice data to the disc." the council man was not satisfied, "and how does the disc communicate with its home planet?" Rafik seemed embarassed at this point, "this we do not entirely know, but the experiments by Mahmud and Jogesh have proved the existance of Einstein Rosen bridges..."

Experiment, an out of order men's room in the basement of the Physics Dept. of a university which choses to remain anonymous:
the chairman, the deputy chairman of the council of nations(and their secretarys. these guys must love their coffee) and pretty much most of the inner chamber. also present were the scientific advisors to the council, a couple of grad students who came free with the electronics hijacked from EECS, fifteen religious leaders, seventy five politicians, five physicists and fifteen astro/phys grad students, two undrgrads who made out on wednesday nights in this room and had walked in hand in hand and had stayed to watch the fun and lastly, a pimply teenager of indeterminate gender who was hocking beer bottles and popcorn. finally, all the circuits had been checked for the seven thousand six hundred and fiftieth time, all the math had been checked by an underpaid, unshaven and unloved math grad who was just slightly less suicidal than his advisor and we were ready! a soft ping sounded as contact was made and the room waited in awed silence to hear the first sounds of life outside earth! a faint hiss sounded, followed by a loud warbling and then a deep resonant voice sounded. as i fell to my knees i thought "this is it, HIS voice!" "thank you for contacting Galactic Central. Congratulations, you are now a sentient civilisation. to continue registration, press 1. to speak to a customer care representative, press 2. this call may be monitered for quality and training purposes".

flying colours

if you are an underachiever like me and if you are blessed, nay cursed with a large group of overachieving friends and relatives, also like me: then perhaps you have heard of the expression 'and she passed the exam with flying colours'. yes, flying colours. expressions like this are abused thoughtlessly by people happily ignorant of the physics and tha grammar of it. the grammar i leave to people who study english litt (not that they care), the physics we can discuss right now. ok, so someone is flying. i can live with that. and that someone is also colourul. sure! but which colours are we talking about? yellow! nay, green! nay, yonder yokel- blue! (i just love using anupras especially when its totally unnecessary!!) now did the above snipets make any sense. say yes, please... thank you! abolutely smashing.. she was flying towards us. this is the point i am trying to make. flying colours will be doppler shifted!!!!!!!

sorry toton, rooni

this one is a very special apology to toton. for those who dont know toton, she is an organic chemist. until recently, i pretended to be a physicist. i am not quite sure what i am these days, but lets just put it this way, if the schrodinger wave equation accosted me in a dark alley, i would run, instead of whipping out the appropriate basis set and bopping it on the head. if the last sentence didnt make sense, take heart, thats all the physics here. righto, so, apologies to toton. many has been the time i have dragged her out of the lab for a cuppa. many has been the time i have airily brushed away protests to the effect of 'i have been standing and running a column for ten hours, gimme a break'. apologies again. its not possible for someone to appreciate such things when that someone understands science as the kind which lives betwixt the dry pages of a notebook and can be postponed indefinitely by Ctrl-S or Esc-Shift-:wq if you belong to the civilised class of those who swear by the penguin. sorry toton. while i am at it, additional apologies to rooni, one preparative solid state chemist(i shudder to think i have referred to that science by the unflattering acronym of 'piss'). yes, rooni, many many apologies. again, dunderhead that i was, i never appreciated the fact that after eight straight hours of grinding a sample, life begins to look like a grind (there i go again, sorry for that one as well rooni), and one has a constitutional right to snap at anyone in the vicinity. a smartaleck trying angular momentum conservation experiments on the only revolving chair around and making smartalecky comments about the efficacy of fedora over windows deserves to have fedora stuffed down his ungrateful throat. you also, have earned yourself the right to bite and scratch.
now why this sudden burst of remorse? well, mainly because i have just started wet lab work today, and while what i did is pretty much nothing, just the mental effort involved in pippetting the right volume and not screwing up makes me appreciate how easy i have had it for so long. well, everything comes around, i am laughing out of the other side of my mouth while eating humble pie and regretting. yes, regretting.

nauko

aadorer nauko. mane ki? janina? ekta gaaner naam, nauko ta aadorer kikore hoye? kolkateye brishti porle to mone hoye je raastaye gari noye nauko'r dorkar. april maasher modhyey, na thik april noye.. ujo'r thk aage.. september maashe jokhun brishti porte shuru kore tokhun ei ek koti lokeder obosthya ta besh dekhar moton i hoye. amader first year e anjan dutta'r ekta programme schedule kore hoyechhilo derozio hall e. shei din brishti porlo.. brishti'r byapare amar obhigyota karor theke kom noye. panh bochhor shillong e chhilaam.. shillong er kaachhe ekta graam aache. naam 'mausinram'. shekhane shob theke beshi brishti hoye. shaara prithibi te. shilling shei jayega ta'r beh close competitor. jaggye, kothaye chhilaam? hyan kolkateye bishti.. to kolkateye brishi porle prothom prothom besh bhaalo laage. mane gorom te kete jaaye, besh shob kichhu porishkaar laage.. kintu.. tarpor.. jol jomte shuru kore.. kolkate ta jol joma ta etoi shabhabhik ekta ghotona je sheta niye lokera aar kicchu bhaabena ba bolena.. jeyi bochhor jol jomena,, shei bochhor kotha hona jaaye bote. ei jaa! jete hob.. update pore debo.

googlish

there is an interesting saying which tells us that it is bad to know what we want as we will never find it.. its is perhaps better to search aimlessly...
pebbles on the shore.. this will be the subject matter of a loooong post, but later..
spectroscopy is the one true science
know your god, know your wave equation.
have faith in maths...

new year

yes, yes its a new year...
i wonder whats the big deal with the new year.. i mean its not like the new year has any significance whatsoever.. look, thenew year is defined by an arbtit point in the earth's orbit around the sun, cos some bloke wanted it so... lets imagine that this is not the case.. well, its not as if the 31st of december coincides with either the apogee or the perigee of the earth's orbit, or with anything else of any significance.... so why the big deal? and all those silly picture postcards and greetings we send each other.. snow! snow at the time of the year which we call new year is a phe nomenon peculiar to the northern latitudes.. we honest south asians should have no part of it.. ok, so i have had a lousy new year.. and it shows..

cinematic crimes

i dont quite know who started the trend; it may have been subhash ghai with 'pardes', but once he got the ball rolling (or whoever it was), the bollywood people have had a greattime abroad. looking at the movies made in recent times, the classic 'gaon ki gori' has died a quiet and unremarkable death only to be replaced by the 'item number' babe. decent cinema has been trashed and what we have is govinda prancing down some boulevard in some obscure european town in a polka dotted shirt and yellow pants. i mean, i have been told that govinda is a decent bloke and pretty smart to boot. but think of this people: we have organisations who take care of human rights, children's rights, wimmen's rights (ok, so there is no organisation to take care of the rights of unhappy JRFs, but let us pass over that lightly..) so why is there no organistion which fines these 'superstars' (may their fuel run out and may the go to gravitational collapse) for inflicting their hideous sense of fashion on us?


yes, we indians are guilty of many many social crimes at home, and quite a few abroad as well, but surely govinda as our cultural ambassador is where we draw the line? well, not so. akshay kumar is almost as bad as the aforementioned great. this bloke thinks that wearing black is cool, a steven seagal wannabe. tell him that steven seagal looks like a demented vampire learning karate and akshay looks pretty much the same. the only people who wore black and carried it off impeccably are trinity, neo and morpheous. go figure.

and what is the point behind shortening one's names? makrand becomes mac?!!! yuck! ok, here is my point to the good akshay: is the scriptwriter has decided to call you makrand, it is because of some deepseated grouse he has. but the best you can do is to take it like a man. calling yourself mac and wearing black doesnt help. it merely underlines the deep pathos of your life. again, the only point (in recent times) where a name shortening was not awful was when siddharth became sid in dch. dch was a classic. face it akshay, you have never made a classic, and you never will. leave it to the people who can.

oh, yes, while i am at it, a small message to the bollywood community. there can be movies which lie somewhere in between 'auntie no. 1' and 'muhafiz'. why not try making some of those? there is an audience, trust me. for starters, get all those buggers who didn't see 'lakshya' and ram it down their throats. the indian audience must get out of kindergarten, or what i think has happened is that it has been demoted from middle school to kindergarten. i mean, look at 'sholay'. and look at 'ddlj'. i rest my case.

someone give rahul bose a chance to act. also try getting rahul, akshay khanna (not kumar) and aamir khan together in a farhan akhtar movie. the heroines don't count, they have stopped acting a while back and window dressing is all they are good for. but in case one needs a heroine, get preity and maybe sonali kulkarni(not bendre).

Chennai autowallahs

The auto is an ubiquitous aspect of urban life in india. they range from the little petrol run contraptions called 'peepde' (ant) seen in kolkata, to the somewhat larger and substantially noisier diesel 'garuda' autos (which can be a godsend when you are trying to make it to the tollygunge metro station during the monsoons and the family canoe has sprung a leak...). another one of this family i had encountered ages ago in chandigarh (7 years ago, one bitterly cold winter, having pulled off some minor stunt at a KV quiz competition and trying to make it to the railway station in time) had had its regular engine removed and ran on a kerosene fired portable generator. behaved like a small girl in fact; loud and rather petulant. then there the huge 'vikrant' autos which are found in central and north india, huge contraptions which can seat (read as squeeze) a correspondingly huge indian joint family, complete with five generations and a dog. these autos sometimes have meters (note that this meter is the instrument, the unit of length is the metre; and yes, i prefer the british and indian spelling) which are calibrated as per the whim of the driver and level of intoxication of the official inspector and is also correlated to how much the aforementioned stalwart is collecting under the table. sometimes, the driver has the misfortune of overcharging, and then being rude to a pretty college girl who just happened to be the neice of the son in law of the first cousin of the aunt of the mother in law of the maternal cousin, once removed of the deputy police commissioner. in which case, the driver's hindquarters are subjected to forward impetus by the leatherclad foot of the deputy commissioner. as you realise, it pays to marry into a family which boasts of atleast one deputy commissioner. (a deputy magistrate is even more useful).. but returning to the theme of this post, autowallahs come from all sections of society(well, not all..); they perform a service which is vital, their hours of duty can be quite awful, and i can only imagine what sitting all day in an open vehicle surrounded by trucks and buses all belching the most thick and sooty smoke possible does to their lungs. very often, they are the little guys who keep a city's transport running. their's is a necessary and largely a thankless job. having said that, i generally loathe autowallahs with an intensity bordering on the homicidal.
all too often, i have been taken on a ride by autowallahs inn ways more than one. it ain't to bad in kolkata where strict unionisation ensures that charges are fixed (the idea being that any one autowallah doesn't rob you, they all collectively do! this is a beautiful aspect of a "socialist in lip service but capitalist in fact economy" which is not immediately apparent to those yokels who live and deal in wall street in believe in such laughable ideas like the free market..) well, yes, the charges are fixed, the autos run on routes, the cops are paid off, and elderly officegoers have the security of standing in line without risking life and limb in a mad rush to grab the first auto. the union regulates itself and sometimes you as well. we find it safe and convenient. its a bong way of doing things; a remarkably intelligent way of doing things.
bangalore is much worse; here auto's run on meters, there are no fixed routes. but the basic problem is that you are at point A and want to be at point B. the autowallah wants to be at point C. hence, no agreement. the whole idea with being at point C is that there are infinitely many peoply at point C who want to be at point X, Y, Z and alpha. how does one remedy the situation. going with the infinite wisdom of muhammad who said that he will go to the mountains if they dont come to him, you can wish to go to point C. at which the autowallah becomes your best friend and even tells you about how much he loves Rahul Dravid and hates Ganguly (at which point you starts loathing his black soul, being an ardent bong and Ganguliphile yourself. for those who are at sea, Ganguly is the caption of the indian cricket team and a great cricketer, Dravid is a good cricketer and the wannabe captain. We hate Dravid.) Or, you beat the cirle, and give up your pathetic call centre job and start driving an auto.
chennai. the city of Jayalalitha, sambhar(an evil thing to eat) and evil twisted autowallahs. the city, also of matscience, where i have several friends, cheers to them, and the hometown of a good friend of mine (sorry, i hate to trash the city this way, but its not personal). yes, chennai autos have meters. that was a hollow laugh you just heard. meters which are so badly calibrated and they rip you off so hilariously that the autowallahs have stopped using them for shame. instead, one goes through an intricate process of bargaining with them. this is considered good etiquette for madrasis (chennai-ites). you mention your destination. the autowallah looks at you with an expression that clearly says 'what kind of a villager lives in an out of the way place like that? look at me, i live right next door to the legislature, this is what i do for a hobby'.. ok you get the picture. then he mentions a price. at which point, regardless of what the price is, you clap a hand to your forehead, point the index finger of the other hand at him and burst out laughing. rolling on the pavement for a bit also helps. after a bit, you sneer and tell him that the price he mentioned is about decent for a round trip to the moon. or chicago,, at the very least. at which point, he asks you to quote a fare. you immediately quarter whatever it was he had suggested. then he does the laughter routine. this goes back and forth for a while. after about six iterations, you reach a consensus. your journey then begins.