I Fucking Love Cars

You really should check this site out if you do too.

Below: the text of my first post on the forum… this sort of thing turns me on, perhaps it will one or two of you as well!

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Dear Team,

My first post on Team-BHP! I’m excited! :)

I have a second-hand 2001 Zen AX that’s logged 45,100 km. It’s been in the family for the last 4 years/since 35k odometer reading. Small-town use until May ‘08, when we put it on a truck and shipped it over to Delhi for my use. Only city use since then (39k reading).

A few weeks ago I was driving home on a reasonably familiar road that I hadn’t been on for a few months (Minto Road, off CP) when I encountered a gigantic, really large, unmarked and unlit undulation in the road surface at high speed. I couldn’t slow down in time, and the car literally went flying over it. I was airborne for a second or so, and then came crashing down with a thud that sent my heart into my mouth. I stopped and checked for obvious external damage, but there was none– not that I’m an expert.

I got the car’s 45k km service done yesterday, and when I picked it up the service advisor informed me that there’s a “leak” from one of the rear “shocks”, and, worse, that my “rear RHS axle” is “making noises” and needs to be replaced! (He didn’t mention any wheel rim distortion, which is the other thing I was worried about after the crash. I rotated, aligned, and balanced the wheels as part of the service.)

Quoting from the service report: “RR shocker, both bumper, brake pad, RH axle need change. Clutch need O/H.”

Questions:

(Q1) I’m a student and simply can’t afford to be replacing axles and shock absorbers (springs? bushes? –I don’t know the correct term) for another six months or so, hence my question is– is it safe to ignore the MASS recommendation and continue driving as before, given that I can’t hear any suspension noises myself or feel any problems in the vehicle’s handling? Or should I have the diagnosis of “making noise and needs to be changed” verified by a local mechanic?

My father taught me that there’s no end to the money that one can pour into a vehicle, and thus to limit spending only to things essential for the safe operation of the car or bike. I’m just not sure if this qualifies as one of those things. I do plan on keeping the car for the next two years at least.

(Q2) My clutch needs an overhaul as well; this I agree with, because it’s in terrible shape and engaging first can be quite tough. Is it safe to get such major repairs (clutch o/h, axle replacement, and brake maintenance) done from a local mechanic as opposed to a MASS [Maruti Authorised Service Station] in order to keep costs down?

I don’t blindly trust the MASS, for they keep telling me that I only need the car serviced at 10k intervals and the tyre pressure at 30 psi, when the owner’s manual clearly specifies 5k intervals and 24 psi pressure (stock 145/80 R12 MRF Zigma-CT tyres on steel rims). But I would trust them more with a clutch and axle job than I would a random mechanic, given that I haven’t found one I can really trust. (I had such a guy for my motorbike, but he can’t recommend his counterpart for the car.)

(Q3) Why would they ask me to replace both bumpers?? :eek: They’re in far better condition than most Delhi vehicles’; in fact the car, being a small-town product, has a better body than most. Should I take this recommendation seriously? I can post pics if that’d help advice.

Thank you for any responses. The levels of technical knowledgeability here astound me!

Cheers,

- Perakath.

Cabwallah

My landlord couldn’t get a taxi to drop him at Indira Gandhi International tonight. He tried the two taxi stands I referred him to, but they refused (all cars busy, apparently). I could have given him more avenues to try, because I hoard taxi operators’ numbers and because the only day in the year you can’t ring a taxi in Delhi is on Holi, but instead the landlady (his mother, not his wife) asked me whether I’d consider dropping him at the airport in one of their cars and bringing it back alone.

Because I’m a suckup, because I’m terrified of losing the parking space I enjoy at their pleasure, and because I love to drive, I agreed, even though the airport is 35 km from our house, and even though the LL’s wife can drive perfectly well and could have dropped him instead.

We left at half past midnight, and by one o’ clock we were stuck in a traffic jam at the Naraina T-Point. Sheesh. Delhi– the city of eternal construction, and the city of late-night traffic jams on arterial roads.

After the LL had loaded his bags onto a trolley, I hopped into the right seat and felt up the seat bottom as I adjusted it and the mirrors for my size. (The LL had left both left and right wing mirrors folded in, which is common practice in Delhi at night. The reasoning is that the high beams of vehicles behind you then have two less mirrors in which to blind you… and it’s sound reasoning, really, because night driving in Delhi generally means being blinded from both oncoming and following vehicles. But I say pthooey to all that, you have to use your wing mirrors when driving, and so I do.)

The car for the night was the LL’s new red A-Star, sold as the new Suzuki Alto in the West. I’d read good reviews of it– but then they were reviews in ZigWheels, which has never said anything unflattering about any automobile in its life, so I didn’t really believe them.

But I must say: what a nice car. The newly-developed Suzuki KB-series engine sounds (quietly) throaty and powerful rather than refined and smooth, and that’s fine by me. The gearbox was light and responsive. The mirrors (internally adjustable– thank goodness!) were just the right convexity. The brakes felt far, far superior to my car’s– but then mine are rather washed out.

And man, was it fast. Most people exaggerate when boasting of how fast they drove their car or rode their bike (a friend once claimed to have ridden an old Pulsar 150, with pillion, from Vellore to Bangalore (300-plus km) in 1.5 hours. Bull, bull!), but I kid you not– with my usual amount of throttling, that is to say I wasn’t trying to race:  the car easily hit 70 kmph in 2nd gear, 100 in 3rd, 120 in 4th… and then I ran out of road, each time. These figures may well be par for the course depending on what you drive, but for a 1-litre-engined small car, they translate to eminent drivability. It’s not the speeds themselves that stun, so much as it is the fact that in my Zen I would have hit those same speeds one gear higher each time. (I must get my hands on a petrol Swift soon.)

Given my family’s predilection for second-hand cars and diesel MUVs, I’m not used to anything remotely approaching a modern performance petrol vehicle. It must be fucking good fun to drive one.

Overall, the experience reminded me, quite tragically, of how it felt riding the Londonwallah’s gorgeous 180 cc Pulsar compared to my old 110 cc banger.

***

Some notes on Delhi’s roads:

- Rani Jhansi Road, the winding snake that runs past the Filmistan cinema hall from Sabzi Mandi to Karol Bagh, has been cleared of its tyre merchants. You know the one– dozens upon dozens of old tyre shops by the side, just like the wine and charcoal merchants of Gergovia in Asterix and The Chieftain’s Shield? The tyre road? Yes, that’s it. Except it’s now the rubble road. The merchants have been relocated elsewhere, I remember reading in the ‘paper a few months ago. Good for the government.

- The extensive, almost continuous flyovers that are characteristic of the western portion of Delhi’s Ring Road make traffic flow nice and smooth during daytime… but turn into speed traps at night, when lorries and heavy goods vehicles are allowed into the city. Even the smallest of inclines can reduce a truck’s speed to quite literally a crawl, but their drivers continue to imagine themselves to be on the Daytona Speedway as they overtake a lorry that’s overtaking another lorry that’s stopped for a piss break, leaving cars no room to pass.

- According to the Delhi Jal Board, it’s quite necessary to do deep sewer rehabilitation work… on a flyover.

- One of the things that used to drive me crazy about Delhi drivers was their love of blocking lanes. I’d be zipping down a 3-lane carriageway and see someone driving directly above a lane marking, rendering both lanes on either side useless and unpassable in. I honestly couldn’t understand why they didn’t just choose a lane and stick to it. I now know better. It’s because you never know when the vehicle in front of you is being driven by someone who’s decided to actually stick to the (ridiculously low) posted speed limit of 50 kmph. If you drive nicely in the marked lane, you’ll never know when the lane on the left is free for overtaking in. (Another traffic violation there, but who cares.) The trick is to hang slightly left of the car in front, so that you can see around its left side as well as its right. And if that means you traverse lane markings, so be it. I don’t drive any other way these days. It’s the only way.

I must say, though, if I ever claim to understand why drivers refuse to use the dipped headlight beam in traffic, and say that “It’s the only way,” come and shoot me dead, do. Fucking assholes.

Searching For Lost Keys

WTF? Thursdays returns!

Be warned, but be sport enough to check it out.

http://shastagibson.com/2009/02/26/wtf-thursdays-searching-for-lost-keys/

Not Suitable For Work.

Looking Down From Ethereal Skies

I bought myself a shiny new toy last weekend– a sleek new silver-and-white Seagate 500 GB external hard drive. It cost more than half the money I got from the sale of my motorbike, but hopefully it will prove itself worth it over the years. (Half the rest of the bike money will go on the car’s 45k km service this Friday. Damn. Will I ever have enough money and time to get a tattoo?)

My room neighbour has an older model Seagate of equal capacity himself, and on Monday– Mahashivratri, gazetted holiday in 2008 but not so in 2009, wtf?– I copied all the video content he had, except for the Hindi toadcrap movies. It took over 4 hours to copy it all: I now have more than 260 full-length feature films, most of which I haven’t seen before, six complete television series, and some miscellaneous shorter videos of Russell Peters and motorbike stunts and the like. It’ll take me over a year to get through all of them, if ever I do.

The real value of the storage capacity, though, is that it has freed up my ThinkPad’s puny 33 GB hard drive, previously full to capacity (220 MB free, I had) and allowed me to hit the torrents with a vengeance. Not for movies– I have more than enough of those now– but for music. I have in my My Music folder a Notepad file called “Songs To Get Jul 07″, in which I write down the artist and song name every time I hear something I like.* It has three running lists– of ‘regular’ music, trance and other electronic dance music, and progressive metal. I’ve started with the prog, getting Dream Theater’s three most recent live albums (each of which are three CDs long), an album by a band called Circus Maximus, a fantastic solo album called ‘Suspended Animation’ by Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci, and Keane’s 2008 album ‘Perfect Symmetry’ that at first listen seems strangely devoid of hooks, but perhaps it’ll grow on me… ah, there’s a hook now.  Also on the list for today are Symphony X’s recent masterpiece ‘Paradise Lost’ (the strongest prog album I’ve heard in the past year), albums by Spock’s Beard (‘Day for Night’) and Sonata Arctica (‘Silence’) that I want for specific songs on them; and some old albums that I had on audiotape but lost when cassettes went extinct: The Police’s ‘Greatest Hits’, Ace of Base’s ‘The Sign’, and Bon Jovi’s ‘These Days’ (Jana gave me that as a birthday present in 1996 or ‘97: seventh grade, and a brilliant bloody present it was. The previous year he gave me Shaggy’s ‘Boombastic’– not such a great one, that!).

It’s not perhaps the coolest set of music you’ll find in early 2009; it can hardly be described as new, sharp, angular, or upbeat; only The Police and Bon Jovi’s lyrics come close to meaning anything significant; but it’s music that I love and haven’t had for years. Thank Ceiling Cat for the interwebz and p2p sharers, really.

***

There’s one small issue with my new drive, though. It requires an external power source, and the four-socket extension strip I use is already full. I can manage easily enough by swapping the drive and the CD player when I’m not using one or the other, but when I was doing my four-hour copying from the other hard drive I needed to dedicate two sockets for them. Something had to go, and I chose the adapter for my DSL modem.

I’ll say that again. I voluntarily turned off my internet connection while I was in the room. It was a momentous step: akin to an alcoholic pouring the contents of his whisky bottle down the sink, or a twelfth-grader being alone in his room and not whipping out his johnson for a quick beat.

I spent most of Monday in my room, with the laptop on but with no internet connectivity, and I survived! I didn’t compulsively cycle between Hotmail, Facebook, Reader, and Bhehnchod tabs to see if anything new had happened in the last five minutes. It was strange, but quite a nice experience.

Of course, now that I’ve begun my music collecting, I can’t have the internet off during the day. But that Magic Monday has given me the courage to try something else, something unprecedented, and something I’m becoming quite good at– having the computer on, but closing all web browser windows and tabs. It improves productivity ten-fold (which isn’t really hard in my case, given the tiny denominator, but still). I can now be in my room, have the computer on, and not be sitting in front of it. Can you imagine that?

Also, I’m pushing the boundaries of this detox experimentation quite far, I must tell you. I wrote this post with the computer switched off.

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* Mostly from Last.fm or British radio sites, but occasionally from other people’s collections, DJs at bars, and once (just once) from the PA system at a South Ex record store when I was there to buy an Iron Maiden concert ticket.

Oh, Joy

What the fuck is he so happy about?

I spent the afternoon cleaning my room, and now it’s bicep day at the gym.

Baby Bear’s Porridge

Gosh. Sonam Kapoor is so freaking attractive! While not being ridiculously beyond-dreaming-about glamorous. Just right.

(She’s on the right.)

Jump When I Tell You

I began jumping rope (skipping, as we’d normally call it) as a way to warm up without delay on winter nights in the gym. My gym has one working treadmill, one working exercycle (perched on another kharab treadmill), and two broken cross-training machines for about twenty people at any given time, so they can’t be depended on to be free. Since I feel quite ridiculous jogging on the spot, I thought I’d try skipping– that most girly and yet most masculine of exercises. I conned some family friends into buying me a sophisticated rope of my own (weighted and of adjustable length, don’t you know?), and took to it.

I find skipping a great way both to warm up and cool down, and also to raise my body temperature if a workout gets too slow, with too much time between sets.

I’ve slowly been getting better at it, and today I crossed the arbitrary mark of one hundred non-stop skips. I positively cruised past it, and stopped only because the psychological barrier had been broken.

One hundred skips may not be much to you if you’re a regular skipper, but if you’d seen me struggle when I first began, and given my body frame, it’s a moderately big deal, I think.

The Wikipedia page is short and sweet, and full of praise for the “sport”:

Jumping rope can avoid the knee damage which may occur during running, since the impact of each jump or step is absorbed by both legs. Jumping rope also helps strengthen the arms and shoulders. This combination of an aerobic workout and coordination-building footwork has made jumping rope a popular form of exercise for athletes, especially boxers and wrestlers. Jumping rope is particularly effective in an aerobic routine combined with other activities, such as walking, biking, or running. Many tennis players around the world jump rope to increase their endurance for competitions.

It turns out jumping rope is taken quite seriously in some parts! Competitions focusing on skills and style, world records, and (no doubt) stunts abound. (Quite amazing, isn’t it– pick an activity, any activity, and you’re guaranteed to find thousands or millions of people around the world more fanatical about it than you are, and way better to boot.)

So I doubt I’ll ever be this good at it:

… but I can try for this, now, can’t I:

Yes, that’s right, exercise is one of only five things I blog think about these days. You should be so focused.

Honestly

I went to my local Electoral Registration Office in Assembly Constituency – 3 (Timarpur) after class yesterday. You probably don’t, but I know where it is– I’ve been many times before, trying to get myself registered as a damned voter in the “world’s largest democracy”.

I tried, again.

They fobbed me off, again.

It doesn’t matter why. As a law student I know all about the “correct procedures” required by our delightful governments, but there has to be a more transparent way of handling all this crap.

You can take your patriotism and your dil maange more and your rang de basanti and your lallllooo prasad jackass and your foreign congress chief and your commonwealth games and your Delhi Jal Board and your Bus Rapid Transit and your corrupt, corrupt police force and, as The Offspring so eloquently said, shove them up your ass.

The truth is that this country pisses the bleeding fuck out of me, and I hate it.

Quarter Coorgi

I must admit, it’s quite cool to be from somewhere most people aren’t. Plus it explains away my big nose. (The Coorgis, Gauls, and Greeks all descended from the same tribe, don’t you know?) And Nikhil Chinnappa is Coorgi, and I’ve always admired him and his Popeye biceps.

In keeping with Coorgi tradition*, “purely non-vegetarian”: so I introduce myself when asked– but that’s not entirely true. I realised when I joined college a few years ago that I hadn’t, until then, come across truly carnivorous men. Some people I know will simply refuse outright to even consider eating at a vegetarian restaurant. “Oh fuck dude… it’s a veg place?? Okay, so that rules that out.” Me, I’m perfectly happy to order vegetarian pizzas and eat South Indian Brahmin food. Paneer and soya get me slightly sexually aroused, even– not that they’re S.I.B. fare.

And so I’m perfectly happy with my veg tiffin, and have been for over a year and a half now. (Prior to that I used to get beef and/or fish dabbas from our local Mallu Dhaba that, sadly, closed down, and took a sizable piece of North Campus life as I knew it with it. I blogged about it at the time.) Four rotis, rice, dal, and sabzi for lunch and dinner, boring as it sounds, is actually more than enough to keep me ticking. And there’s a great variety of dals and sabzis out there, if you didn’t know.

I do feel the need to supplement my protein intake when I’m gymming, though. I’m not interested in the commercial protein supplements available at a surprising number of outlets around Delhi U– you’d think such expensive things would have a smaller market, really– mostly because their side effects, while not as serious as those of anabolic steroids, are considerable over an extended period; but also because I’m not looking to achieve that sort of muscle growth. (Muscle simply will not grow beyond a point unless dietary supplements are taken. The difference is evident: I can distinguish a ‘natural’ gym product and a supplementer on sight.) The aim remains the Baywatch Body, not the Salman Khan.

So it’s regular dietary protein for me, then. Since I don’t have a stove/kitchenette, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did, unfertilized chicken eggs are the easiest option to ingest. (Besides, I fucking love eggs. Mmm. Egg soup.)

I boil them in the electric kettle my mother forced upon me a year ago. It’s not as strange as it sounds, really. You merely need to ensure there’s enough water for all the eggs to bounce around in as they boil, and leave them to stew in the hot water for a few minutes afterward to let the yolk harden fully. The only drawback is that on occasion they crack, and bits of albumen seep out and directly boil in the water. Yes, I know that adding some salt can stop the cracking: I think someone told me on this blog wonly. But salt only comes in 1-kilo packets, and I know I’d keep eating it plain…

I suppose the egg bits provided the substratum for the fungus to grow on, then.

You see, I’m usually terribly finicky about water and its effect on materials. It’s a terrible substance, that hydrogen hydroxide: rusting car parts and coat hangers, swelling books and wallets, running ink, dissolving and etching glass bottles… brrr. So leaving the water in the kettle after use is a big no-no-no. Who knows what might happen?

Given my terrible experiences with urban water shortages, I hesitate to waste any amount of water (and death to the park fountain – installers!), but since my room neighbour’s potted plants all died a dry death last month I have no option but to pour the used kettle water down the sink or into the commode. Usually. Last week I forgot to, being caught up with reading about the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission’s fund allocations to Delhi, or some such bullshit, and the next time I opened the kettle to pop in more Gallus gallus oocytes I was in for an unpleasantly fungal surprise. Black and grey circles on the carpet inside of my kettle. Yuck. Spin me around again, and rub my eyes– this can’t be happening.

To the point of this garrulous, prolix, and rambling post:

Just how filthy must the insides of our water supply pipes be? 

 

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* Younger brother Perakath is a stark exception– he doesn’t like chicken! We don’t know what to do with him.

Garrulous, Prolix, and Rambling

 

MAHESH BHATT v. UNION OF INDIA – Judgment delivered by High Court of Delhi on 23 January 2009

 

 Background

 The Government of India, through its Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, in October 2005 by Gazette notification amended Rule 4 of the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Prohibition of Advertisement and Regulation of Trade and Commerce, Production, Supply and Distribution) Rules, 2004 (as amended) to prohibit the advertisement of cigarettes and other tobacco products, including inter alia depiction of use of tobacco products in cinematographic films and television programs except as provided.

 Even before the notification bringing the amended Rules into effect was published by the Government, the amendments were challenged by a civil writ petition in the High Court of Delhi by filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt and others on three main grounds:

 (i)     That the parent Act, 2003 was ultra vires the legislative competency of Parliament, as public health is a ‘State subject’ and not a ‘Central subject’ under Schedule 7 to the Constitution of India

 (ii)   That the impugned Rules were ultra vires the legislative/rule-making competency delegated to the Government by the parent Act

 (iii) That the provisions of the impugned Rules amounted to a violation of the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression guaranteed in Article 19 of the Constitution