A tribute to my friend…

10 years on, the touch of his steering wheel – rather the grip of the steering wheel still thrills me…

10 years on, the roar of his intact 3L engine still amuses me…

10 years on, the movement of his gearstick and original gears still amazes me…

10 years on, the reading of his odometer (at 229049 on 15Aug16) still craves me for more…

10 years on, the speedometer’s smooth sailing from 0 to 130 kmph still fascinates me…

10 years on, the average of 12/13 kmpl still makes me proud…

10 years on, his effortless movement thru the lanes still preserves my king of zigzag driving title…

10 years on, I still look back at the first corner I turn after parking him and admire…

10 years on, I still like the world better through his windshield and three mirrors…

10 years on, I still look down from my window at midnights at him and miss our wanderings…

10 years on, I still introduce him as “Carbon – my companion on road and off-road” to my loved ones…

10 years on, I still Love him…

'કાર્બન'

એ સાથી છે મારો...

મુકામ નહીં પ્રવાસ છે મહત્વનો

ને આ યાત્રાનો એ સાથી છે મારો

શ્યામ એ રંગે ને ઘાટીલો રૂપે

પડછંદ, સબળ ને તેજ છે પ્રતાપે

અમૂલ્ય એ 'કાર્બોનાડો' જે નામે, એ સાથી છે મારો..

સાથ અનંતનો જામતા ગયો સમય જરા વિશેષ

પણ તાલ-મેલ એવો કે દુનિયા આખી કરે છે દ્વેષ

શહેરો જોયા અનેક, કર્યો હજારો કોસ પ્રવાસ

મઝધાર નવ હું અટવાયો, હો પૂનમ યા હો અમાસ

હાથે કીધે પલટે દિશા ને પગને ઈશારે પ્રવેગ

હોય ભલે રસ્તો ખડકાળ કે માર્ગ દ્રુતવેગ

આ સમય સાથેની સ્પર્ધામાં, હું એનો સાર્થી ને એ સાથી છે મારો...

સમજે એ મારા હર મિજાજને

મન ઉકળે મારું ને પૈડાં બાળે એ

ખુશ હોઉં હું ને ઝૂમી ઊઠે એ

ખીજ હોય મારી ને ચીસો પાડે એ

ઊંઘ ચઢે મને ને લથ્થડીયા ખાય એ

ગુનગુનાટ હોય મારો ને નાચી ઉઠે એ

ખરો એ દોસ્ત છે મારો, એ સાથી છે મારો...

કોક કહે સોબતી સાચી ઓળખાણ માનવની

કોઈ કહે પિછાન સાચી એની 'કાર'

વળી બોલે કોઈ પરખ તો માત્ર એના મિત્ર

લગીરેક ચિંતન મર્મ એ જ ખોલશે 'પૃથક'

આગવી એક ઓળખ એ મારી, એ સાથી છે મારો...

The King of zig-zag driving

have you ever experienced some old guy smiling in his car thinking "that was a crazy bastard." of you? well, that is how he appreciates your speed, your style, your passion and your guts.. this is a typical scenario when he watches you approaching through the rear view mirror, blinks his eyes once and observes you flying away through the front windshield. a quick experience of the Doppler Effect... violate shift of your head lamp to red shift of your tail lamp!

today, i want to share a driving experience i had a few days back. i was driving my car, Carbon, to Ahmedabad from Mumbai. on that route Surat to Vadodara is a six lane road, with heavy traffic. a lot of buses and trucks use that road and unfortunately they drive on all three lanes of a side! there are two wheelers too alongside cars... but all that make the drive really challenging, enjoyable and eventually memorable. i drove around 200km at an average of around 100 kmph. and during the trip i thought of zig-zag driving... formed some rules and followed them...

some of the rules are here...
- drive in such a way that others do not have to break because of you.
- do not make anyone honk unnecessarily.
- accidents are fatal, avoid them.
- don't hurt your car.

it is a harsh world out there. if you do anything wrong, people honk. you lose points for such mistakes. so, timing is crucial on every stage, whether it is pushing the clutch paddle or shifting gars or turning the wheel or pressing the accelerator... any of the timings is wrong and your car would groan in pain. making anyone break is literally a crime. accidents can show you the way to a prison or a hospital or even the one-way to the dead-end. so, keep all your five eyes in action...

zig-zag driving is not a one man show, rather it is a double act. you and your machine, your car. you should know your car inside out. what it can do and what it can not... how fast it can go and how quickly it can stop... how much space it requires... when it needs a gear up and when a steering turn... what its mirrors show and what its door frame hides... your car is the extrapolation of your body or you are just the decision making 'part' of your car!

it is a challenge for your body... coordination among various body parts... your eyes on the road... your one hand on steering and the other on the gear changer... your one leg on the clutch, other handling break and accelerator... your ears, listening to the music your car deck plays... your brain and spinal cord gathering information, assessing and responding in real time... it is a challenge for your sensors, controller and actuators. you are a mechatronic system! it's a test of capability of your brain to control these organs and of your organs to react to the command. it is a test for your sub conscious as well...

zig-zag driving is a dynamic phenomena. all the dimensions are changing with time... distance between different vehicles are increasing or decreasing... you should judge not only if your car can pass through a passage, but also what would be the size of the passage as you would approach it. your angle of approach to the passage also has a say as your requirement of space changes in different direction... you are a heterogeneous body!

again not only distance, velocity and accelerations are important, jerk also plays an incredible role. when to hit the throttle and how hard... for how long before decelerating... again breaking is not uniform.. and it does not stop at jerk or third derivation of distance... sometime you wait for a passage to open and as it opens you rush trough it... sometime you wait for proper approach angle, break suddenly, change angle and speed up to enter a closing passage... you are a Newtonian body!

driving in zig zag fashion through crazy traffic needs an act of PID (proportional integral derivative) controller. it takes current, future and past events in account while deciding an action. you should know of the current position of all the vehicles around as you pass through them... you should know their position a little while later (integral) as that would tell you what passages would open for you... also, when and where... you should know positions and speeds of the vehicles you just passed through (derivative), so as to get an idea about which lanes to enter and which to avoid. you should know this history of past 7 to 15 seconds if you travel at around 100-120 kmph, to avoid honks... you are omniscient!

there might be more... but this is how much i could grasp... it was a lovely experience and i loved every moment of it. it was an adrenaline pumping act, but ironically i was singing a very soothing, slow, Indian classical song, Aan milo sajna... from Gadar.. however annoyed or excited you look outside, inside, you are always calm and compose!

literally no car could come close to overtake me throughout the 2 hour drive... i made no other car honk or break... and of course did not collide with anything... maintained a good speed.. and most importantly, i enjoyed my drive. i was so swift and so wonderful that i was thinking if there is a crown called 'the king of zig-zag driving'? coz if there is, i am here to claim it!

A different ball game on the home pitch!

There are these few lines that came to my mind today...

1. Wow! am touching the air at 100 today...
2. So that's what they call the phenomenon of helmet kissing the cheek...
3. Why insect hit is not as popular a phrase as bird hit?
4. i believe i can fly

And all that coz I kept both right side tyres one spare wheel and a steering wheel home and took a 225cc motor bike. Road was the same but the feeling was new...

The helmet was a little loose on my head and so once I was above 70-80 it was stuck to my face. I actually realized it only when I was below 80 and suddenly felt air passing over my cheeks after the pressure release. and I was smiling the I am now...

And the tiny insects and even dust particles... oou... they hurt.

But it is an amazing feeling... the resistance of air against your chest and stomach as you split it... the sound of your flickering half sleeves matching the roars of the power strokes of the cylinder... to see the effect, a slight twist of your right hand can generate... the energy flowing from the engine to your body and then through your nerves... the wait for your wheels to kiss goodbye to the asphalt road as your mind takes off... taking you away from the world passing by to the top of it... the moment when you realize you can soar!

The Dynamics of Winning

I have had hard time for last few weeks... nothing was going right anywhere and everyday I was fighting not to get depressed. This is one thought that came to my mind...

I was driving home from the factory. One more of my experiment didnt yield the expected results. was feeling low... was thinking that i am loosing here...

its a big word... loosing... then i thought, loosing is a dynamic state and not static. lost would be static coz then there wouldnt be any fight to be fought. then i thought, as Newton said, a body remains in its dynamic or static state unless acted upon by an external force. now this force can be in either direction and the final effect on the body would be as if only the resultant force is acting on it. and this resultant force is a vector sum... sum of all the external forces considering their intensity as well as their direction...

so from a loosing condition i can force it into the winning condition which again is a dynamic state and then further i can go and win... now won is not a static state coz as soon as you win, there are many more bettles you would like to jump in. so, winning never ends...

and in a few moments i was up again...
determined to fight again the next day...
determined to win...

Behind the wheel…

Do you like cars?? Do you like to drive them?? Are you one of the crazy perceiver who cares to think how your suspension springs dance when you slam on the brakes or pick up the pace? When you spin your steering? Do you enjoy the sound of your car’s first roar in the morning and when it starts rolling? Do you feel the gears moving in you when you go from second to third gear? Do you like to count zero as the number of cars that overtook yours at the end of the day? Do you feel like breaking of a dream when you have to turn the ignition off? Do you always find yourself looking back in admiration at your car at the first corner you turn after you lock and start moving? Do you feel yourself truly “YOU” when you drive? Well, I do.

But here I want to write about some experiences when the view out of the windshield looked different… when the world outside the car asked for special attention or extra consciousness from inside.

1^st experience is from 1^st July 2007. It was a rainy evening in Ahmedabad. I had to go to the airport to drop a friend. On our way to the airport my wipers stopped working. It was raining heavily and we weren’t in a position to stop. In a few moments the windshield was all foggy and the view was all blurred due to the flow of water. Then we had to open the window glasses and had to see thru the open window. Somehow we reached the airport… at the time of returning to the city the situation was worse. I was alone this time and the water had formed a layer on all the glasses by film condensation. But the good part, there was a friend of my friend at the airport and she also was going towards the city so we decided that I would follow her car. So as we started, I was able to see almost nothing and all my concentration was on two red back lights of her car. It was a good experience, when you are almost blind and following, literally blindly, the only lights in the sight, without thinking what it is or what direction is it leading. And then the flow of the water on your windshield and different patterns formed by it – that gives a feel of a door invisible otherwise but so much existent and in reach, an image to blind you from the reality and still so real in itself.

In a few minutes I had to take a turn from where I had to take a different road. And soon the image lost in reality…the door shut – hidden by the light which refused to come thru it. The patterns united and became a single shade of black. And then my eyes started a search for their existence. They started blinking rapidly for a while and then stopped suddenly; alert and wide open like checking any footstep around or looking for their own footprints in the air. Soon they found themselves breathing as the car reached another corner and we found the street lights to take us home.

My second experience is from 5^th September 2007. We went to a hill station called Mt. Abu. It was rainy season and we enjoyed our two day stay there. We had to start at 5 O’clock in the morning the next day. When we open the door of our cottage we found that we were in a dark cloud. It was so dense that once in the car we weren’t able to see the mark on the road just a couple of meters away, with all our head lights and fog lights. We decided to move on. This was an experience when all I knew was I was moving, on unfamiliar roads, in unknown direction, unaware of the valleys on either sides, unknowledgeable of the possible bears wandering around to hunt. We actually turned a wrong corner and reached a dead end. Moving around in the cloud can make you feel gloomy and lost. Till the farthest point where your sight can reach you see a blend of grey substituting everything that ever existed. With every breath you take you give way to the spreading giant to eat you from inside. And you keep on running into it in to find a way out of it.

We found the correct path and started descending. Soon we left the blurred grey and entered a smiling combination of blue, green, orange and violate. And the joy of living prevailed in the surroundings again.

The third experience is from 27^th September 2007. It was just after the dusk at the industrial south east of Ahmedabad. The silence in the air was so much disturbing. There were many other vehicles on the road but looked lifeless moving objects. The air was still and the yellow in the sky so dull that froze the flow of gasoline in the cars and of blood in the drivers. The view from the glass was of a model of a civilization in a museum, where motionless idols perform a frozen moment in the history. A moment that has taken away the smell from the flowers, withdrawn colors from the rainbow, evacuated the life from the plane of the Earth…
Well, the life was pumped soon and the rainbow was colored again and the flowers were spreading the fragrance again, as the wheels moved on.