an old age rant

Mishmash.

That is actually what this post is. It has some random and totally unrelated things, off the top of my mind put in one place. Without further ado, here goes:

One, I have my very own domain name now. Thanks to my uber-awesome mum and dad, they gifted me with the best possible long distance birthday gift possible viz, a .com domain, http://www.subhayan.com. Yes, you heard that right. So now, blog.subhayan.com will actually take you to what was (and still is), wrahoolwrites.blogspot.com.

I shall do a this.

Two, Durga Puja, and how epically awesome it was here in Pilani. Boy, oh boy, I miss those five days so much now. Therefore,

And a +1 if you got what that meant.

Three, the Computer Science Association of BITS Pilani just pulled off a pretty awesome weekend full of events last to last week. Why do I put it on my blog? Because I am the coordinator for CSA and yeah, it felt pretty satisfactory after it ended. It was called The Codestock Festival, and it had five components. There was a programming event in the esoteric language called Whitespace; there was a Project Orientation by the CSA Project Forum for our tech fest next semester; there was a Treasure Hunt that made teams run around campus in pursuit of answers to cryptic clues; there was a webdee event too, that pitched html, css, and a whole lot of web development skills of the contestants in one arena. Lastly, there was a grueling coding event hosted on SPOJ with problems set by some of the brightest coders on campus. All in all, it was great fun and I’d like to thank the whole CSA team, without whom this would never been possible.

Next I move into deeper stuff. I guess this is how you rant when you get old (which I can safely assume myself to be, given that I turned 21 yesterday).

Fake education here in India. After a pretty much one-sided GTalk session with one of my friends yesterday (needless to say, I was the one doing the talking) I managed to consolidate several fragments of an observation that I had been making ever since my third year in college has begun. All of these fragments when put in perspective, seem to imply that the education that we get here in India is, to put it simply, fake. We enter premium institutes after our +2: be it IITs, be it BITS or any other engineering college for that matter. We graduate with BTech’s and BE’s, and get labelled an engineer.

But how many of us, actually remain an engineer? How many of us, actually put all the techincal knowledge to use, after getting the degree? How many of us, actually like engineering as a subject and actually want to pursue it in the future.

The answer is pretty disheartening. I know for a fact that in my batch, the fraction of students who wish to pursue their discipline is small. The overwhelming majority is either composed of the ones who pine for the coveted MBA from an IIM or long to get a job the moment they step out of college.

Let’s dissect the two options here.

First, an MBA. The moment you take admission to an MBA course, your entire engineering knowledge is rendered null and void. Save for the rare exceptions who wish to come back to the educational line in the future. Why then, (I use the word ‘fashionably’ here), ‘fashionably’ take up Science in your +2? Why then, spend sleepless nights and rote and sweat out for two years for taking an admission into an engineering college? Would you not take then, something like Economics, or say, Commerce and spend an easier life and then do a BCom degree if you really want to do an MBA later on? What is all that BTech knowledge giving you? How is all that hard work for getting into an engineering college paying off?

It isn’t! It’s futile, pointless and useless!

The second option, getting a job. This I can agree to, there being people who need to start earning as quickly as possible for a variety of reasons. But then again, why is it, that the most desired job in an engineering college like BITS is one where they pay you loads of money to manage people? Why is it, that some of the most wanted jobs require you to not use your engineering knowledge?

Is it just the students themselves or is something actually wrong with our system?

I met some alumni a few days back here on campus. Not surprisingly, out of eight, only one of them, was still in the technical line. This certain person, was a professor at the UIUC, and was happy with whatever he was doing. The rest were (of course, they were all happy with whatever they were doing), but they were all spread over different sectors and had left the technical line, long back. There was this one banker, who was the COO of HSBC London (impressive indeed) and there was someone else who was doing some big things in Singapore.

But the question remains, did he really need to go through BITS to do all of that? Most of them had been through an IIM, so wouldn’t it have been simpler to just take BCom and then clear the CAT? Oh, don’t tell me, that your BE courses helped you in CAT, I am definitely not buying that.

The thing I guess, that makes it different here from abroad (say in a US engineering college, where people graduate with their BTech’s or equivalent and then enter research) is the whole system of education here. We don’t study because we like to study. We don’t enter IITs or BITS because we want to do engineering, but because we know, when we come out, we’ll get a good job or if not, we’ll do an MBA and then use the IIT-IIM tag to surely get a good job and then make it big as some corporate hotshot.

Consider the courses that are taught here in our college. Actually, no. Don’t consider the courses. Instead concentrate on how they’re taught. I, in the middle of my math courses, and having a tough job trying to reconcile my mind to study Group Theory on my birthday, can vouch for the fact that these are brilliant courses! Hell! I like my courses! I do not get marks in tests, fine! But I like studying Real Analysis! I like Topology!

But yes, the way they are taught, that is what I have problems with. Attending classes hasn’t helped me, and the only bit of knowledge that I have about my courses, is owing to me waging a patient psychological warfare with the authors of my text books. Sometimes, when I understand small things, like Proving that the Cantor Set is uncountable or Permutation Groups,  I actually smile to myself! Yes, I like understanding courses, and hence I do not want to waste all this knowledge in the future!

I do not know what to say now. I have no idea where destiny shall take me. I have too many things bubbling in my mind. I shall end with forty-five seconds of silence for the Adam who ate the forbidden fruit and died of pancreatic cancer, and fifteen seconds for the Mumbai Indians who won the Champions League Twenty20. Yes, it’s that sad.

Actually, so am I.

Subhayan Mukerjee, 9th October 2011

😥

the message

If there is one thing that I have gained after seven weeks of summer internship, it is the sound knowledge of the working of Eastern Railways and the Kolkata Metro. This story is a direct culmination of all that knowledge. Also, pardon my Hindi if in some places it is incorrect. (Update : many thanks Vishala Arya for the corrections 😛 )


—


“Poroborti station, Belgachia. Platform dan dike.”

“Agla station, Belgachia. Platform, dahine taraf.”

“The next station is Belgachia. The platform is on the right side.”

Rajat looked up from the magazine he was reading as the automated voice sounded over his head. He gave an exasperated groan, and cursed the Kolkata Metro announcements to himself. A 40 minute trip from one one terminal station to the other, spanning the whole of Kolkata from the south to the north, fraught with annoyances such as cackling automated female voices and sweaty co-passengers, wasn’t the sort of start he had been expecting to an internship. Also, he had missed the new air-conditioned metro by a whisker, and that added to his present miseries.

As the train reached a standstill, it struck him, that his destination was now only a few minutes away, so he should better ready himself if he wanted to make the most out of the rush when the sliding doors gave way.

With a lurch, the train pulled away again, and Rajat nearly toppled to one side as he tried getting up. Clinging onto the handlebars, and cursing under his breath he steadied himself on his feet. And simultaneously, the automated female voice cackled once more.

“Shesh ebong prantik station, Dum Dum. Platform baa dike.”

“Agla aur antim station, Dum Dum. Platform, baai taraf.”

“The next and terminal station is Dum Dum. The platform is on the left side.”

Rajat heaved a sigh. There, that had to be the last of them all.

He looked around. The crowd had thinned considerably. He had been praying and praying that it does. Seeing the exodus of passengers into and from the train at the stations in central Kolkata, he had remained mortally scared of his turn at Dum Dum.

Needless to say, Rajat wasn’t the type of person who had frequently availed of public transport during his twenty odd years of his life in this city. He had remained confined to the luxuries of air-conditioned private cars, and rarely would one see him taking a bus or an autorickshaw. At worst, it would be a cab.

He looked out of the windows. It was still as dark as the insides of a blue whale. He had seldom been on the metro, but whenever he had, he had never travelled to the Dum Dum terminal where the new extension of the track made it come up to the surface and then travel in broad daylight. That was one little thing he was looking forward to. The transition from the darkness to the daylight, and how it happened.

A vibration in his right pocket brought him back to his senses, and he heaved a sigh realizing that he had once again come within the usual network coverage of his mobile service provider. The intermittent availability of the network throughout the boring 40 minutes of journeying in the underbelly of Kolkata had given him yet another thing to crib about. 

He took out his phone and noticed that it was a text message from a friend, Sup it read. At work? 
On the way. Shit crap this thing, he replied, and looked out of the window again, wondering when exactly would he start feeling the ascent.

And then suddenly, there was light all around. He frowned. That’s it? The thing just goes out from darkness into light? Without any funny feelings in your tummy. On second thoughts, what else would have happened. I really shouldn’t have expected something like a roller coaster here.

The train had now slowed down. It was drizzling outside, and the spray from the window wet his shirt. He moved away from the windows and approached the door.

A few more minutes later, the train pulled into the station. And once again, the now murderous-feeling-inducing automated voice was back

“Jatrider onurodh kora hocche, je ei prantik station e jeno garir kamra khali kore dei.”
“Yatriyo se anurodh kiya ja raha hai ki is antim station par gaadi khaali kar di jaye”

“Passengers are requested to completely vacate the metro at the terminal station.”

And the train gave a final lurch and stopped. The doors slid open and the customary rush ensued. Rajat went with the flow and soon found himself on the platform. He looked around, clutching his bag close to his self, before swinging it around and straddling it on his back. He knew that now he had to make his way to the railway station at Dum Dum. He looked around and fortunately saw a big red sign showing the way down the stairs to the same. This close, huh. All good.

The scene at the railway station was chaotic. It had all the attributes of the usual Indian railway station, random filth scattered in random places, malnourished and half naked children sleeping in front of the counters. Beggars and decrepit old men lying neglected. An involuntary shudder went down Rajat’s spine as he made his way and stood at the end of the queue at the ticket counter. Thankfully enough, the queue was moving pretty quick and it was within a minute or two that he had bought a two way ticket to Agarpara, his intended destination. Dropping a coin in the pleading hands of a woman in tatters, he made his way to the platform. Credits for afterlife, he smiled. He did not look it, but actually was extremely religious and believed in doing good things to people in return of a grateful smile from them. Doesn’t hurt. Does it?

On the stairs up to the platform he stopped at yet another blind old man, and dropped a coin into his steel bowl. On the platform however the scene was healthier. Passengers flocked around. Some aimlessly strolled smoking bidis. Quite a few of them were on the tracks, cutting across it, instead of taking the overhead bridge in their haste. A lungi clad person who was standing a few feet away was making weird facial gestures and holding a glass of what appeared to be water in his hand. Rinsing his mouth, Rajat realised, when the person squirted out the contents inside his mouth onto the track.

He looked around. A few hawkers lined the side of the platform: magazine stalls, tea stalls and the sort. He walked up to the magazine stand and the latest copy of the Top Gear magazine caught his eye. He grinned. Not so bad after all. He turned away and looked at his watch. The next train, the Barrackpore Local was due in less than 5 minutes. He resumed his aimless strolling, checking his watch at regular intervals.

Soon enough, the green and yellow electric locomotive was in sight. It was approaching the platform quite steadily, blaring it’s horn now and then. And another cackling voice, and this was far worse in tone than the mildly respectable one in the metro, blared from the loud speakers.

“Barrackpore Local arriving at platform number 1.”
“Barrackpore Local arriving at platform number 1.”
“Barrackpore Local arriving ar platform number 1.”

Ugh. Rajat frowned.

The people who were cutting across the track scattered, and clambered up on to the platforms on either side, as the train lumbered in slowly. These oafs will die like this, Rajat grimaced. Much as he was cautious in most of the things that he did, he loathed cutting across railways tracks. What is the overbridge for then?


When the train had come to a halt, he heaved himself up and was relieved to see it almost empty. He went and occupied a window seat, two seats away from an old man reading a newspaper.

Accha dada, eita Agarpara jabe toh? (This train will stop at Agarpara, right?) he leaned to his right and asked him, just to reassure himself.

The person did not take his eyes of the newspaper, Haan. Duto station pore (yes, two stations from this).

Rajat heaved a sigh and leaned back, took off his bag and placed it on his lap. Shouldn’t be a long journey, he thought.

The train had started moving by then, and it steadily kept putting on speed. A candy seller had boarded too, he noticed and he kept moving around, asking one passenger after another. He came to Rajat as well, and thrust his colourful lot of candies at him. Rajat turned him down and gazed out of the window. When was the last time I had boarded a local train? He couldn’t recollect. But he was more than glad that this one was not crowded, like the ones he usually saw at level crossings – local trains with people hanging onto the doors. Like bats. As he would say.


The next station was Belgharia. The train halted there for a minute or two before lurching off again. Rajat yawned. He had been up all night watching the Champions League Final. A disappointing game, for the Manchester United Fanatic that he was, and had thus lost most of this night’s sleep. He wished he was home, happily snoring in his bed. Curse internships. He muttered.

Dada, time ta koto holo? (What’s the time?)
He turned around and saw a young man looking at him and pointing at his watch.

Showa Nota. (A quarter past nine) he replied. He took out his phone and whiled some time away playing some random games, till he noticed that the train was slowing down again. Realising that this was Agarpara, he got up again, and headed for the door. An old woman sat huddled, on the edge, who peered up at him when he arrived. Rajat frowned again. What’s with the fascination for edges?!


A few others flocked around him, all readying to disembark. The train kept rolling, slowing down with every passing second. The impatient passengers leapt off the train and hurried away. Rajat rolled his eyes. Won’t ever learn, will they?

It was a few seconds later, when the train had come to a halt, that he jumped off, and looked around. He had to reach platform number 4, and then take a rickshaw from there, he had been directed. Reaching platform 4 would mean taking the overbridge. He glanced down, along the platform and saw one some feet away.

He started walking towards it. The platform he noticed, was far less crowded than the one at Dum Dum. The hawkers and stall keepers however were the same. His eyes wandered around at the colourful advertisement bill boards. There was a new Raymond’s showroom at Agarpara, and they were giving 20% discount. He read the Bengali script slowly. He had studied Bengali for twelve long years in school, and still found reading Bengali to be a challenge.

The train had started moving again. He glanced at it, as it slowly moved out of the platform. The old woman was still huddled on the edge of the door, and was looking at him queerly. For some reason he kept staring at her, till his ringing phone made him break away his eye contact.

It was his mum.

Hullo? Yeah, I’ve reached, … yeah, am okay. Bye!


He dropped his phone into his pocket, and turned around once again to catch that old woman. She had gone forward by quite a distance. However, he could still see her, and the hair at the back of his neck tingled when he realised that she was still staring at him. There was something she wanted  to convey. He didn’t know what.

In fact, he would never know what.

The next thing he knew a metal rod had sliced through his body. He fell down. His phone dropped upon the platform and split open. People around him gasped and rushed to lift him up.

It was too late.

—

Twenty odd kilometers away, Anindita stood outside her house, and locked the door. She looked at her husband.


Rajat’s reached. Says he’s ok.


Her husband nodded. You told him to collect the key from the darwan when he returns? As it is, we won’t be done by then. We’ll be late.


Oops. Hang on, will tell him, she called his number, and frowned. Says coverage kshetra se bahaar hai. (says that it’s outside network coverage)

Network problems. Send him a message then.


Yeah Ok.

—

This story is a work of fiction. But it is based on a true story. Check this : http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/four-killed-in-freak-accident-at-aligarh-junction-113485

territorial PSings

In the first semester of my second year in college, I did a certain course called Principles of Management.

Indeed, no other course has made me so ponder so much about life as this course did. It raised questions like “Why are we here?”,”Where did we come from?”,”Where do we go when we die?”. Of course, not to mention the obvious questions like, “Why the **&^%  &%$& does a math-comp sci student have to study the principles of management in college.”

studying POM

At that crucial juncture in my life, I thought, nothing could possibly be more pointless than this.

But then, the best private engineering college in India has a way of taking you by the scruff of your neck and thrusting you, face first, into a jacuzzi of belief-changing liquid, that … well, changes your beliefs about things.

And that is exactly what PS-1 did to me.

metaphorical passage of time. You can click here if you want. But do return.

Textiles and Machinery Company Limited, also known as Texmaco Ltd., is where I am to spend the next couple of months of my life, working, for my PS-1 and thus fulfilling my duties as an obedient BITSian.

As the name suggests, Texmaco was initially conceived to be a harmonious amalgamation of textiles and machinery. But what it looks like now, it’s as if Ms Textiles pulled a Rachel Greene and ran off from the wedding alter, leaving Mr Machinery all alone. So what we have here is a huge, seemingly endless factory with humongous machines working all around. Smoke bellowing from huge electric arc furnaces. Enormous electromagnetic cranes lifting piles of iron.

And three computer science students, precariously balanced on the fine line separating sophomore from junior, having no clue what to do.

territorial PSings. I attribute the title of this post to the Nirvana classic. After all, with programs such as this in college, what other than attaining Nirvana can we aim for? More on that later.

So. Good thing is, I’m in my own city, in Calcutta and the factory isn’t a bad place. The work going on around is mighty impressive. People are nice. Have a good friend as work colleague.The co-instructor is a senior and a good friend too. There’s free food on offer (In fact, that was the one definitive directive we were given. Whatever you do, you must have lunch here.) It’s just the pointlessness of the whole thing that baffles me.

But I’m happy. I’ve been getting news from my other friends, and many of them have a lot more to crib about. There’s someone in Bhadrawati who lacks the amenities to flush his own crap down the toilet. There are a couple in Hyd who are working with ear canal instruments. There is someone in Mumbai who is (or rather was) sitting in the same place from 9 am to 5 pm and getting breakfast and lunch some 20 times over 😛 There’s yet another innocent soul who is stuck in Chennai, and is completely at sea when it comes to telling the rickshaw driver where to go to. And not to forget, the ones who are completely absconding, possibly in and around regions of  Maoist insurgencies.

Here’s a few-waitforit-memes to help you understand my point better. Did I say ‘poin’t? Oh. Well there’s one at least.

That’s about it for now. Signing off on this pointless note. And giving you this link to hasten the oncoming of winter. Cheerio!

on home, and why it is so.

A week ago, I was in Pilani.

Pilani. We study here.

Yes, that same stretch of deserted wasteland, that God created one fine morning when He woke up to find lice in His hair.

Aside : No offense dude, but it shows.

Actually no. To be honest, it isn’t that bad.

But. Just before the semester ends, when you have all sorts of tests, paper distributions, academic heartbreaks, that work in unison to make you feel like a Marie biscuit dipped in a cup of tea for half an hour, it does get miserable. Very miserable. And then, the prospect of going home shines in the distance like a KFC bucket that is just out of reach.

But then, even semesters end. And a time comes for us to pack our stuff, and bid teary-eyed farewells to our fellow engineering mates (turning purple), and to our much detested abode in the sands.

And then we reach home.

Now. If we actually do a home versus BITS face-off here, there’s no doubt that it will be a a very closely contested battle. BITS has its strengths. DC++. ANC. Wingies. Clubs. Departments. Fests. All of these tilt the scales heavily in BITS’ favour.

But right now, being at home, and being pampered to the point of feeling pangs of guilt flowing through my body, home does seem to be the in thing. The rage, as one would say. And without further ado, let me elaborate on why it is so.

1. Broadband.

the sixth freedom. Freedom to browse.

Free internet. When I  first told this to my dad, he raised an eyebrow, and clarified, “Free as in free speech. Not free beer. Remember”.

Exactly what I meant, of course. Browsing the world wide web with absolutely no restrictions. No trying out different proxy servers. No issues with getting alternate IP addresses. No tunneling. Pure unadulterated freedom of browsing. And thanks to Reliance Netconnect Broadband Plus, getting high speeds. That too on the move.

     2. Food.

burp.

After four months of eating daal that is no different from camel piss. Sabzi that raises questions about existentialism. A fake chicken roast once a week, which is probably a bat’s left breast, deep-fried in the worst possible oils. And a  chicken biryani which tastes like a slap on the face of the city of Hyderabad.

After all this. Home is like the best thing that can possibly happen. You go to MacD’s and sink your famished teeth into a juicy MacMaharaja. Or order a Double Cheese Burst at Dominos, and revel in the cheese as it oozes out onto your palate. Or grab that KFC bucket and tear through it without a worry in this world.

Added to all this of course, is my brilliant mother and the battery of delicacies that she conjures every single day.

This is plainly one aspect of home that Pilani can never ever hope to match.

     3. A Western Toilet and a Bath Tub

Now after gorging on all that food, Home ensures that passing them out is a pleasure as well. A western style toilet is one that thing my knees literally crave for when I do the thing in college. Bloody kneebreakers. That’s what those contraptions back in college are. They do not look like they were even meant to be places to do-the-thing in, in the first place, and the only point of them seems to be in reviving the Dark Ages.

And a bath tub. Oh for the person who hasn’t experienced the joy of spending hours with a magazine in the sweet smelling waters within a bath tub. I really don’t care if it sounds gay. It is utter bliss to say the least.

     4. Cars!

this isn’t our’s. But it is the same car. Our’s is cherry red =)

Two things I sorely miss in Pilani are the two thoroughbreds that we have in our stable. A Toyota Qualis and a Hyundai i20. The car-fanatic that I am, I can never really get enough of them, ever. The sheer finesse of sinking into the seats, turning on the volume and putting your feet down on the gas, is akin to Bilbo Baggins blowing out a smoke ring. No less.

     5. Finally. Calcutta.

The best city in the world. Even better this time around with the election results =)

Oh! Calcutta.

And before I sign off : Home. Here’s a big wet one for you.

the editorials

As the de-facto editor of the Computer Science Association of BITS Pilani, I am responsible, amongst other things, to get newsletters out every month. And that involves, again, amongst other things, writing an editorial to fill the first page of the newsletter.

Inspired by a really old Bong, who does the same with his editorials for the Fine Print, I considered putting them up on my blog, for posterity’s sake.

—

Editorial for the January 2011 issue. My first ever attempt at an editorial. Thus, a sizable portion of it is within quotes, so that I myself had to write lesser. Produced after much trepidation after my knobbly knees had become steady, and the butterflies in my stomach had died out.

—

Amen

What does it take to be different?

OK, maybe I should rephrase and say, what does it take to be differently minded?

Charles Babbage, to whom history has ascribed the title, “the father of the computer”, sure was such.  hen Lord Alfred Tennyson published a poem, two lines in which read “Every moment dies a man, every moment one is born”, Babbage sent him a letter saying that, “I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: “Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born.” I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.”

That’s different mindedness for you.

Sure, he was not the ordinary human being. Indeed, he was a lot more than that. A visionary, a thinker, a philosopher, and of course, one of the most brilliant mathematicians this planet has ever seen.

To Charles Babbage. To the father of the computer. To the reason behind A7.

We dedicate this to you.

—

Editorial for the February 2011 issue. My second-ever editorial. Written at 3 AM in the peculiar time of the day when day is almost at odds with night. Confidence levels that had been generated after the lukewarm success of my first newsletter, were dashed to the rocks while designing this issue. Hence, I was back to square one, and drew ideas from the various intelligence-related articles that had been compiled for this edition.

—

The Question of Intelligence

Alan Turing once said, “A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.” Just in case you are wondering who Alan Turing is, he was the mind behind the Enigma, the code breaking computer, that eventually helped the Allies secure victory in the Second World War.

Today, after several decades of Turing, one can actually contemplate on the possibility of what he had envisaged.

An epic incident this month, wherein a supercomputer beat two men at a word game, has gone a long way in proving that position of humans as the most intelligent beings on the planet, is indeed at stake. There may come a time in the distant future when machine intelligence shall become as instrumental in daily human life, as humans themselves!

Or maybe, machines shall progress in leaps and bounds and take over all of humanity? When man himself shall become subservient to his own creation? Like in Frankenstein and I, Robot?

Only time will tell. But we can always rack our brains over the question of intelligence : should a machine, going by just what it does be considered more intelligent than his creator? More intelligent than the person who infused that intelligence in him?

What do YOU say?

—

That’s all. I shall keep putting up the ones that I conjure up every month, from now onwards.

See you!

on eggs and egg-heads

Yes, this post has a lot to do with eggs and other related stuff, viz chickens and egg-heads.

But before we develop this plot further, please don’t get misled into thinking that this is a copy-pasted slice of text from a journal on evolutionary biology which ought to begin with “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” et al. This is not definitely not so. Though chickens and eggs form a very important part of this discussion, this very surely does not intend to border on text-book subjects that refer to the same. Any violation of the above intent (or lack of intent, thereof) is sorely regretted.

—

boiled eggs. They don’t look so nice here in the mess, but. So what.

Eggs. It would be a horrific understatement to say that I love eggs. My affection for eggs surpasses many of my other worldly affections, which include … umm … let’s chuck that. Anyways, right since my tryst with eggs began, back in the days of nursery school, when my mum used to wield a plate of water-poached eggs in front of my face .. till the present haggling over the mess counter, “bhaiyya, do ande ka egg-rice” my relationship with this wonder-oval has been, a very happy one indeed. Maybe I am a day too late, but, I am ready to make the egg my valentine this year without batting an eyelid.

Eggs are ubiquitous.  It’s the first thing a human baby learns when he reads about “ovals”. It’s the one thing that the cuckoo so conveniently lays in the crow’s nest. Also it’s the one shape that Hercule Poirot’s head so nicely resembles. Look around you and presto! examples galore.

Back home, eggs had always meant a lot to me and my family, thanks to the numerous improvisations that my mum used to conjure up in her kitchen. Now in college, though the variety which I used to indulge in back home has vanished, the egg still manages to bring a smile to my lips and replace that otherwise  menacing frown which results when one enters the mess.

Indeed. Would you rather have the stupid aloo-sabzi concoction made even more disgusting with the dal that resembles jaundiced camel piss when you could rather ask the egg-guy to graciously dish out a nice double omelette for you? ‘course not. Hell no!

Which takes me down me memory lane into the shady corners of RB mess last year. On second thoughts, no, RB mess rocked.

I was initially very confused when it came to taking mess extras. Yes, I am the sort who gets very bewildered when he’s faced with a new situation. Though, I eventually emerge victorious ( 😛 ) I take my time. So on the very first day that I saw a huddle up around one counter in the mess, my curiosity got the better of me and I dared into the unruly throng who were beating about the counter with steel plates. I did not catch exactly what they were saying, but there were loads of “ek ande’s” and “do ande’s” flying here and there. “Andes are never bad” I said to myself, and ventured in. Five minutes later, I was having the best omelette that I had had in the past few weeks.

that’s a tomato omlette. We don’t get that here. But then again, so what.

After a few days of omelette, the egg fanatic in me demanded poached eggs, and I went to the same counter and said, “bhaiyya, do ande poached”.

I wish I hadn’t uttered that. The egg-guy gave me a look of utter incomprehension. As if I had just asked him what the Navier-Stokes equation was and why it was still unsolved. It took a few seconds, and a few more stifled chuckles from all around before a kindly third yearite explained, “Dude, I think you should be asking for fried eggs.”

I was baffled. Fried eggs? Poached eggs sound so much cooler. You fry stuff like potatoes, vegetables. You fry fish. Frying eggs would bring eggs down to the level of all these things. It would be demeaning eggs and showing utter disregard for the lofty stature in the hierarchy of food items, that they so rightfully deserve and occupy.

A trifle peeved, I muttered the required insult, and in a few moments, was sitting amidst my friends and wingies, gloating over my new found indulgence. A poached double egg. And in the course of conversation, I unearthed an eye popping truth.

No one seemed to know what poached eggs were. No one that is, except for my GoodOldBongFriend who, like me, was having trouble believing that the situation was so. We were throughly dumbfounded. We sat and ate like a couple of baffled bongs … hell, we WERE baffled bongs. And silently passed snide comments about our ignorant countrymen. I am sorry if I sound racist or regionally prejudiced, but I just can’t help it.

A few more days passed, when more truths were unveiled. Though they were far less eye-popping than the previous one. My KungFuPanda Tambram sidey confirmed that poached eggs were to us, what Bullseyes were to them. Now when he said that, I did remember seeing or reading about bullseyes. But I also remember “ewwww-ing” when I had heard of it for the first time, and had wondered how such a beautiful delicacy could be in any form of human logic be associated with the gross eyes of a bull. Maybe jaundiced bullseye would have at least gotten the colour right, but as they say, logic is one thing that humanity lacks.

Moving on. Three semesters passed, meandering through tests, classes, lectures, fests and of course, a lot of omlettes, plates of egg rice, fried eggs, hard boiled eggs, and egg bhujji. Till I rediscovered something in my second year, that drew a nice grin on my otherwise bong visage.

The liquid yolk.

The yellow liquid yolk of the egg. Which is another way of saying, life seriously rocks.

This very awesome egg-guy in VKB mess. What he does is, half-fry eggs, without turning them over, so that the upside remains liquid-y, yet just enough cooked to remain free of the H5N1 virus. Actually no. But it’s a risk worth taking.

Now there’s a way of savouring every delicacy. With half-fried eggs, with the sunny side up, it is as follows.

fried / poached / bullseyes. Call it what you want. It kicks ass.

Eat away the white albumin part, without spoiling the yellow thing in the middle. Because, the yellow thing in the middle : that’s the show stopper. That’s the real deal. the white part is the general rag-tag band performing. The yellow is the Led Zeppelin. The final performer. What everyone’s been waiting for.

There are several ways of enjoying Led Zep. You can head bang to Whole Lotta Love. You can come drunk and stay dazed with Kashmir. Or you can just sit and delve in to the melodious realm of Stairway to Heaven. So it is, with the egg yolk. You can either

• a) sublimely deliver a smooth cut with your spoon parallel to the top surface of the yolk. And revel in the yellow as it oozes out onto your spoon. Or 
• b) you can hack at the egg with the spoon, holding it perpendicular to the top surface of the yolk, and drive it right into it. Like a stabber who has no knowledge of using a knife. And then sit back and enjoy the yellow as it flows onto your plate.

I am sorry if that invoked anything gross in my dear readers’ minds, but it does explain stuff really nicely.

OK, I am too dazed after giving birth to this metaphor. The labour pain is very high. So I shall quit now, with some lines from the Beatles.

I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.

on a first hour

now when you see things such as this, you know that somewhere down there, something is seriously wrong. With this in mind, proceed.

—


the alarm clock rings, it’s 7 o’clock

and mefeels much like Socrates drinking hemlock.

for in an hour’s time I would be

sitting and dozing in a class called MuPee.

Oh, for the non-BITSian reading this,

and wondering what on earth MuPee is,

MuPee is a health hazard and I am guessing,

it stands for Microprocessor Programming, and Interfacing.

Oh ye first hour, ye heartless soul!

do you really know how much you take your toll?

Nah, I know, you really do care.

Just as much I do about what Lady Gaga wears.

which reminds me, why do I attend thee?

when I would rather be dreaming about a chocolate tree?

But still I do, I’ll never know why

just like why Harry Potter had a bowl of rye.

Not that he did, but he always could have,

just like the modern day driver who’s using SAT NAV.

So back to the first hour, and the issues it raises

most of which to us, is what land is to water-barges.

For one it involves, getting up early

and then brushing all those teeth to make them white and pearly.


now yes, I know that sounded lame.
But you do know that the poem itself is the same.


now while brushing your teeth you need water,
which for us in winter, is like a colony of ants facing an ant-eater.


(… phew …)


so once done with this initial ordeal,
one takes out his time table with absolutely no zeal.


oh, for the winter, and the warmth it begets.
when one is snuggling cosily under two blankets!


alas, those are, but dreams forever lost.
much like the woolly mammoth and the summer frost.


the journey to the mess is always fraught
with much hesitation for the student distraught.


for the food that is available there,
is reason enough to cause despair.


but when the tea is hurriedly drunk
he who wakes up gets a scalded red tongue


and all your hopes of cursing and swearing,
bite the dust with quite a lot of hair tearing


the trip from the mess to the bloody FD
is always rowdy, and seldom speedy.


and once, with trepidation, you reach the class,
the only thing you can utter is a throaty ‘Alas!’


for there stands the teacher, grinning with spite
and waving white sheets with diabolical delight


the agony lasts for minutes fifty
after which the siren sounds, very very thrifty.


So up we get, and scurry back to our rooms,
perpetually dirty they are, for we don’t have brooms.


and upon reaching, into our beds we dive
and shut our eyes for the time we are alive.


for death is near, and while I won’t go that far,
for those will be chronicled in “on a third hour”.

—

thank you Nickspinkboots for the truck-loads of inspiration.

on Ayrton Senna

My thoughts entirely with this name today. After a certain documentary I watched last night.

I had heard a lot about him. How he would have gone on to become the greatest ever in the blitzkrieg world of formula 1 had destiny been but a bit more rewarding. Little did I know that well before the disaster at Imola which claimed his life, Ayrton Senna had established his name as the greatest already.

He didn’t have the statistics on paper. He had raced for 10 years and had won 3 championships. Juan Maunel Fangio (with 5) and later on, Michael Schumacher (with 7) would go on to become the greatest F-1 racer of all time, but the ones who know the sport, tell a different story.

Ayrton Senna’s greatness laid, not on paper, but on the sheer way he drove. Formula One experts including Schumacher himself have openly admitted that a driver like Senna, has not, does not and will not exist in motor-sport history.

The documentary I saw yesterday was all about what exactly made him all that great. Martin Brundle, an F-1 great, who had raced alongside this genius went into details about his driving style which he considered would give enough reasons to consider him the “ultimate driver’s driver”.

Speed
Senna was not just a fast driver. He was just the fastest driver one could race against. While others would set lap-records and fastest times with a margin of a few tenths of a second from the existing record, Senna would settle for no less than a whole second or at least three-quarters of second. “He had this God gifted talent,” as Brundle put it, “a sixth sense, which gave him full knowledge of where in the track the grip would be before he went into a corner. The moment you see him do a lap, you’re bound to say, “I can’t do that.” As simple as that.” He was known to drive completely on the limit and set some of the most blistering lap times in his ten year career. “He used to emerge out of corners and overtake a whole lot of other drivers with the most consummate ease. Other drivers wouldn’t even have him in their mirrors a few seconds back, but suddenly .. poof! He’s gone past them.” The fact that he won 65 pole positions in 162 races when pitched against Schumacher’s 68 pole-positions in 269 races more than cements him as the speed overlord. His qualifying greatness reached it’s epitome in Monaco 1988, when he out-qualified his arch-rival and team mate Alain Prost by a staggering 1.5 seconds. Brundle recollects that “Nobody in the end wanted to spoil Senna’s pole lap. When the day-glow McLaren and the very bright helmet of Ayrton Senna would come through, we’d literally jump out of the way. You didn’t one to be the one who’d blown the lap of the one everybody was talking about, the lap that entire Grand Prix venue was looking forward to.”

Senna in his epic McLaren in Canada 1988

Attention to detail
It wasn’t just speed that made Senna what he was. As David Coulthard, yet another F-1 legend who started off as Senna’s test-driver recollects his dedication.”A certain test session when he (Senna) had tweaked his neck, and that was it. Test was over that day but as far as he was concerned, “I recommend the following day” and he was there the following day! In the morning I thought that … OK .. he must have made a miraculous recovery … but no, he was just there to listen to what I was telling the engineers. So that he could trust my feedback.” I mean other people whom I’ve been test driver for would just listen to the lap-times and bugger off to the golf course!”

Ruthlessness

one of the numerous corners Senna (in the red and white McLaren) aced

Yet another and one of his best wielded weapons, was his utter ruthlessness. As Brundle explains, Senna would often put them (his rivals) in a position where you’d have an accident and he would leave it up to you to decide whether you wanted it or not. If you let him through, you wouldn’t have the accident, if you did not, you would. During a certain Formula 3 race, Brundle says, “he suddenly came up from behind me and before I knew it, his car was upon mine.” He would always put his rivals in a compromising position at every corner, and wage this psychological warfare every single time. You would either run into him, which would mean, your race is over, or you would lose this mind game. And   if you did run into him, he would ensure that the next time such a scenario repeated you would jump out of his way. He was easily the toughest driver, and the most ferocious driver to protect his area of space. His ruthlessness and will to win reached the peak in the Japanese Grand Prix of 1990, when he would emerge world champion of the season provided his arch-rival Alain Prost (now racing for Ferrari) failed to finish the race. This makes for a throughly gripping tale.

Senna and Prost were 1-2 on the starting grid respectively. Senna’s McLaren however was on the dirtier side of the track and despite his asking the officials to change the side they hadn’t. No sooner had the race been flagged off than Prost’s scarlet Ferrari took lead ahead of Senna’s McLaren. And for Senna to win the world-title, Prost would have to not finish the race.

Barely had ten seconds gone when the first corner came up. And Prost went into the corner ahead of Senna. But Senna accelerated through the corner reaching a speed of 270 kilometres an hour, without even bothering to brake, as the gap between his and Prost’s car disappeared. Suddenly Senna’s front left tire had hit Prost’s rear end. And Prost’s rear wing fell off as both cars skidded off into the turf.

In the very first corner of the very first lap Senna thus made sure that Prost indeed failed to finish and secured the world title for himself.

Senna’s McLaren hits Prost’s Ferrari

and the state a few seconds after … Senna, secured with his Championship title

Prost was so disgusted with the turn of events that he publicly slammed Senna’s tactics and even considered retiring from F-1. After the crash Senna however showed absolutely no remorse for what he done. “When there is a gap,” Senna said later, “you either permit yourself as a professional racing driver who is designed to win races, or you come second or you come third or you come fifth. And I am not designed to come third, fourth or fifth. I race to win.”

Senna’s aggressiveness; his ruthlessness can be well summed up in his own words. “If you no longer go for a gap which doesn’t exist … well, you are no longer a racing driver.”

Strangely however, Senna had a heart of gold. A devout Christian he was capable of incredible compassion. When in Spa 1992 his rival Érik Comas had a fatal crash, Senna stopped his car, leapt out, stopped Comas’ engine and held his head in a comfortable position before doctors arrived. An incident which made Comas retire from F-1 after his inability to help Senna after his life claiming crash.

Senna parks his car and runs to help Erik Comas

This paradox in Senna’s behavior shows that he was an incredible human being. He would donate for his  poor children in his country Brazil. he would help his rivals out of difficult situations. He was morally broken when Ratenberger died the night before he died. But then it was the same Ayrton Senna who would crash Prost’s car out of a race, putting both their lives at risk.

The Wet Weather Master
What really set apart Senna, all the more from other F-1 drivers was his driving wizardry when it rained. Referred to as “the Wet Weather Master” by commentators, his driving prowess would really come in the limelight in such circumstances.

Senna mastered the art of wet-weather driving

Donnington Park, 1993. The track was wet and it was drizzling. Senna was having trouble keeping up in his inferior McLaren from the beginning. He had dropped to fifth position when a new lap had begun, behind the likes of Michael Schumacher, Damon Hill and Alain Prost. A couple of corners later, he had muscled his way to third. And yet another couple of corners later Alain Prost was eating his tire marks and Senna was leading the race, which he went on to win. This historic lap, which saw Senna taking the lead within a half of a lap of running fifth, established him as an all time great wet weather driver. After the race he said that the driving pressure in such conditions is tremendous and it’s like gambling; taking chances where it might pay off. And that his team gambled well that day.

The cars back then
Senna gambled. Senna gambled in cars which were like untamed wild beasts. Racing regulations weren’t as stringent then as they are today, and Senna belonged to the era of F-1 when cars had turbochargers (needless to say, they are illegal in F-1 now); he belonged to the age of Formula -1 when cars produced 1200 horsepower, which was a mind-boggling 450 more than an F-1 car of today. Inferior aerodynamics back then, as compared to today, ensured that cars had a lot less down-force and was at higher risks of flying off. Also safety levels were far worse which made Senna’s job all the more difficult.

Senna’s epic McLaren Honda MP-4/4 : the machine in which he won eight races in one season and his first world championship title

Yet Senna aced. He drove on the edge without a care in the world. He drove to win. Which he did. And would have won more had he been luckier.

Imola, San Marino 1994.

An event already riddled by disasters. Ratenberger’s death the night before the final race had shaken the entire F-1 community. The night before that, a serious accident involving Senna’s protégé, Rubens Barichello had broken Senna down, all the more. The final race as well, was plagued by misfortune. It was interrupted in the very beginning when J J Lehtto’s Benetton-Ford had stalled, and Pedro Lammy’s Lotus-Mugen Honda had rammed into his rear at nearly full speed. A wheel tore off and flew into the grandstands, injuring eight spectators and a police officer. The race went into yellow flag, and the safety car, which was on Opel Vectra for that year, was deployed. The slow pace maintained by the Vectra was later questioned and suspected for the lower-than-normal tire pressure in the race cars.

When the race restarted, Senna immediately shot off and set the third-fastest lap of the race, followed closely by Schumacher. In the next lap, as Senna approached the super-fast Tamburello corner, his car left the track …

That would go down in his history as the last corner he ever took, and the first one, he never came out of. Alive.

… his Williams ploughed into the concrete wall in excess of 215 kilometres an hour.

His right front wheel had broken off and shot through into his cockpit, hitting his helmet and pushing his head against his head rest. A piece of upright, attached to the wheel had penetrated his helmet made a big indent in his forehead, and a jagged piece of the upright had penetrated his visor just above his right eye.

He died almost immediately owing to fatal skull fracture. Track officials, upon investigation found a furled Austrian flag in his cockpit, which he had planned on unfurling and waving in honour of Ratenberger in the event of his winning the race.

Senna’s Williams at the moment of impact

The cause of his accident, as later revealed was steering column failure which had resulted in this fatal under-steer (what happens when you turn your steering wheel, but the wheels don’t turn). Patrick Head, of team Williams, who had been responsible for the “bad-design and badly executed modifications” of Senna’s steering column, was proven guilty of omitted control by the Italian Court of Appeal on 13th April 2007.

His death at Imola, San Marino was probably the greatest tragedy in the history of motor-sports. Brazil declared a national holiday in honour of their greatest sportsman and set aside three days for mourning. Three million people lined up to see his funeral march and offer salute to their hero.

Senna’s funeral saw many F-1 greats participating. Including his arch rivals Alain Prost and Damon Hill

His grave bears the epitaph “Nada pode me separar do amor de Deus” which means “Nothing can separate me from the love of God”.

To you, Ayrton Senna. Never was. Never will be.

to and on Vegetarians

I have absolutely nothing against vegetarians. Many of my GoodFriends are vegetarian, and how dare I have anything against them?

sample vegetarian. Notice the look of extreme sadness on her face.

Nevertheless. Nevertheless, they manage to bewilder me. They make me scratch my head and make  me ponder upon the futility of such a life; the inherent sadness of such an existence. And all this they perform by the sheer power of the fact that they are vegetarian.

At a personal level, (I hope I don’t get into issues with the PETA) I believe that it is an animal’s moral duty to present itself on my plate when I sit down to eat, at least once in its life time. The fact that it can do that only once makes the previous statement sound a tad redundant but let that not taint the vitality of my faith.

I’ve been involved in countless food-brawls with my GoodFriends. By food-brawls I refer to brawls over food, not brawls with the food (the thing that the WWE superstars are so competent at). And most of this have ended with a tongue-lock when I am left to counter the very very ancient and incorrigibly clichéd argument regarding the “compassion and love for all things living”. Which I admit, I cannot. The best reply I can give when someone stumps with a “How would YOU feel like if you were to be eaten someday?” is that “I cannot foresee a future when I would be within 50 miles of cannibalism at any point in my life.” Lame, I admit. But works.

Which brings me to the question of plant perception. Can plants feel?

Hell, yes they do. I base my conviction on the numerous results that appear when you type the same question in the Google search-bar. This, being the most glaring. Discarding non-vegetarian food on grounds of “compassion and love for all living things” can now go to the dogs. But yes, them vegetarians, are hard nuts to crack. My GoodOldSidey (I don’t know whether whether he’s reading this) (yet another vegetarian, needless to say) comes up with this extremely contrived extension of the same reason. Which is, “I don’t like eating something which has yelpt in pain and cried so that I may eat it”.

If he had as much of a white soul as he appears to, after this revelation, God bless this sin-stained world, but that is besides the point.

To him, and to others who would like to emulate him, let them be made aware that when Sir George Bernard Shaw visited Sir Jagdish Bose’s laboratory, he was stunned to see that cabbages suffered from violent convulsions when boiled to death. (A piece of information shamelessly wiki-lifted from the above link). To them I ask,  “Will you stop boiling cabbages now?” I think I know the answer to that.

Plants (continuing upon the same spree of shameless wiki-lifting) actually have a very well developed nervous system and they respond to shock by spasm in exactly the same way as an animal muscle does. Just because one cannot visibly see or hear the pain a broccoli plant goes through when you chop its limbs off without a bother doesn’t prove anything. You can as well wait for goats to sleep (or use tranquilisers for that matter) before you behead them and proceed to cut them into nice chops and blah-blah.

Another thing.

Vegetarian food has this weird way of staring up at you and shouting, “Hah! Your ancestors fought their way up the food chain and you’re somewhere down there again.” Quite right! Being vegetarian is like openly disregarding the revered concept of the food chain and showing scant respect to the laws of evolution, which over millions of years have carved a path for you, so that you, as a Homo sapien are given the birth-right to be a secondary consumer. If not higher.

Therefore, by being vegetarian, you actually go against nature and it’s predetermined laws.

Hah. So much for your compassion and love for nature now.

Quad-erat-demonstrandum.

would you have all these?

or well, just this?

PS : Andy Rooney ( I have absolutely no idea who he is) says that “Vegetarian is an old Indian word for ‘lousy hunter’ “. I say, “Bullseye.”

voila! volvo

I am not the frequent bus commuter. Never was either. The few tiffs that I had had with these annoyingly large multi-wheeled vehicles are best left untold, for times’ sake, and for the sake of not beating-about-the-bush.

But then things happen which make you go “Voila! How wrong I was” and make you change your stance towards things. Which is what happened as a side-effect after my Goa trip, which you might just remember from my previous post.

I am, if you’ve been following the story of my life closely, currently anchored at Pune, and shall be leaving for Cal in a few hours. So the trip to Goa which I was party to, happened from Pune, and hell, it happened in one heck of a delightful manner.

Courtesy Volvo.

Yes, you guessed it right. It was a Volvo multi-axle semi-sleeper coach that did the monumental task of transporting myself and several others from Pune to Goa. That too, in the lap of luxury.

The ten-and-a-half-hour long journey, whose mere first mention had sent an involuntary shudder down my spine, eventually left the generally verbose me lost for words. And with good reason too. My fascination for all wheeled-contraptions compelled me to do some homework after I returned, and the results I arrived at were pretty interesting. Or at least, they are to the auto-enthusiast.

The coach that had taken me from Pune to Goa, was a certain Volvo B9R.

For those who are trying to stifle their yawns now, can freely choose not to, and navigate away to this page. For the rare ones who are falling off their seats in excitement can join me for the rest of this fascinating journey.

A Volvo B9R is, as I have mentioned earlier, a multi-axle semi-sleeper coach. Using the British policy of Divide and School, let us fragment the hieroglyphics in the above line to facilitate better understanding for those who are groping about in the dark.

Multi-axle == more than two axles. Which simply translates to, it has more wheels than the ordinary bus.
Semi-sleeper == er … half sleeper. Meaning where you sleep, but then again, where you don’t.

multi-axle clear now?

The technical specifications however are far less literary, and more … technical (sorry for the redundancy). The power-train is a massive 9 litre 6 cylinder diesel engine that generates a staggering 380 horsepower and an equally gargantuan 1740 N-m of torque. (If this sounded gibberish to you, then you should have left this page long back. Don’t look at me like that! I warned you!) And this does a more than exemplary job at making this blue whale scrunch down miles and miles of expressway with the most consummate ease. The coach is 13.7 metres long, and no, don’t ask me what the width is. No one cares. It seats 53 homo-sapiens effortlessly and has cutting edge safety features including EBS (Electronic Braking System ), all wheel disc-brakes, and air-suspension, all of which are firsts in this country. What’s more, it even comes with an on-board computer which feeds in brakes and suspension related data to the rare computer-savvy driver.

I am assuming that the orange LCD screen is the on-board computer.

But what really stole the show in this mighty machine was the galactic levels of comfort it pampers you with. The moment you sink into one of these outworldly seats, you feel a sense of bliss like no other. Recline the seat backward. Raise the lumbar supports, and you could well mistake the experience with that of being in a private jet, complete with all creature comforts.

the heavenly seats. And guess what, I can now semi-sleep.

I got a tad too lucky with the front row seat that day, as a result of which I had the additional advantage of having the seemingly endless windscreen r-i-g-h-t in front of me. When the journey began, it was an unexpectedly quaint affair. The virtually air-tight cabin had completely muffled the otherwise deafening roar of the engine, and the bus, with all it’s air-suspension wizardry and thick tubeless radials seemed to gobble up the potholes and irregularities of theGreatIndianRoads without a hiccup.

Yet another impressive thing I noticed was the incredibly small turning radius. I have driven a Toyota Qualis and for a car of that size, it is surprisingly agile around corners. But for the 13.7 metre long mammoth that it is, this beast executed U-turns and other letter-like turns in the manner that could have left many large luxury saloons burying their heads in shame.

Well, that’s that. I wish I had driven it too, then I would have been able to give more details regarding its performance, engine and transmission (:P) but well … I can rest assured now, that I have started loving buses.

Or so I hope.