Flying Lap

The Circuit of Kottivakkamheim is a 4.2 km street circuit, and one of the oldest on the Chennai Traffic Grand Prix calendar. Actually, it was not even a circuit originally. The history goes that there were first all the houses and buildings and the 15 temples all along the route. With the odd Onyx (or Neel Metal Falanca, whoever gave the lower tender) dustbin thrown in along the way. And then someone realized that it would indeed be a good idea to have some sort of opening in between all of the above mentioned buildings. You know, sort of so people could get from Point A to Point B. And viola, the opening became a regular, Grand Prix-fit road, and thusly Kottivakkamheim was born. Of course, as births go, this one would have probably been called a Cesarean.

A flying lap of Kottivakkamheim starts with the First Main Road straight, before breaking down into 2nd gear, 30 kmph into the right and then the left leading into the Second Avenue. This sweeping, 3rd gear right turn is also the widest part on the circuit, and sets you up very nicely for the Signal, where you break hard down to zero kmph. This novel part of the circuit tests not how fast you can go, but how patient you can be. For the true test of a Jedi, is not in how fast he can be, but how he can choose when to be fast. Anyway...

From the Signal, you take off into the MG Road straight, up through the gears till you hit 4th at 70 kmph, and then flat out up the hill before breaking to a near stop at the Vannandhurai Bus Stop chicane. Though originally designed as a right turn, an inspired act of median-placing ensures that this turn is as challenging as it's more illustrious namesake at Spa-Franorchamps. You climb up a gear into 30kmph as you negotiate the tricky gravel (and sand and bricks and mortar and old papers and vegetable peels and discarded slippers) traps on either side of the circuit to ease into the Anna Street Ascari chicane.

The Anna Street Ascari, named after the 7-time Chennai auto-driving champion, Annatha Ascari, is unique in that it's simultaneously a left turn, a sweeping left-hander and then a right turn, all rolled into one. Holding on to third, at 40kmph before breaking into the blind right which forms the end of the chicane requires driver control of the highest degree. For the back-marker in front of you, that is. Because if he's not going to cooperate, no amount of standing on the horn will make you go any faster than 20 kmph through this tight part of the circuit.

Safely negotiating the chicane leads into the longest unbroken sequence on the Grand Prix calendar, full 2.6 kms down the Kalakshetra Parabolika. Going up through the gears into 4th, this part of the circuit is not for the faint-hearted. With enough pits (as in, the depression kind, not the refuelling kind) strewn along the path, an overtaking maneuver is pulled off only with inch-perfect slipstreaming and acceleration. On a clear piece of track, this narrow but fairly straight piece of circuit can be taken flat out at 70 kmph, before one slows down for the final chicane at the Marudeeswarar Temple complex. This second gear, 25 kmph chicane (if the Maami does not choose this as the opportune moment to cross the circuit to go towards home of the Lord) leads into the East Mada Hangar straight. Another part of the circuit where the car in front of you determines your speed rather than your own driving skills. Especially when the car in front is not a car at all but a Corporation Garbage lorry which leaves behind an oil(y) spill behind it. So, this always-yellow flag part of the circuit is a strict no-overtake zone, as you trundle along at 35 kmph in a part that would usually be a straight horsepower shootout.

Out at the end of the straight, you break into La Rascalasse, a tight, sandy right-hander which has floored quite a few two-wheelers in its time and is often referred to as the most expensive spare-parts dump on the circuit. This first gear, 20 kmph turn leads into the home straight as you go up through the gears to top speed, and past the start-finish line.

Or to be precise, into the office. Where one has to come to a complete standstill, if one is to not bang into a wrought-iron gate.

Circuit of Kottivakkamheim
Lap Record: 12:34.53 Anand Natarajan, Novafax (2008)

Ta da!

Much more readable, isn't this?

Irrespective of whether there's anything to read in the first place.

Soiled Shirt

The little boy wouldn't have been a day over 8. He had a round face, with equally round eyes and hair that fell all around the round stopping just short of the eyes. He was uniformly dirty, a common situation when you're from one of those million families all over India where the one pot of water a day is better used for drinking than other unimportant tasks like bathing. His T-shirt had once been a light cream in colour, but now it was closer to brown. The brown was in patches though, unlike the uniformity of the dirt on his body. Possibly an effect of the previous day's rain which had washed down the stains, leaving areas of different shades of brown over the shirt. He had stepped out of his house, if it could be called that, in search of his mother. His little round eyes spotted her in the shop across the street, and like all kids his age who spot their mother after a search, started running towards her without a care in the world.

The Toyota Innova on that street clearly did not belong there. It was one of the automobile industry's greatest coups to convince Indians that there was such a thing as a city-friendly SUV. And SUV is not city-friendly. It is most certainly not side-lane, cross-street or gully-friendly. However, these are the most common connecting sections that are found in India, where first the houses are built and the remaining area is called the road. As a result of all these reasons, the Innova on this little street was finding the transit very difficult indeed. Hence, when the driver saw a sudden stretch of nothingness open up in front of him, he gunned the engine. And if there's one thing an SUV can do, it is accelerate. The car gathered speed, the driver intent on making up the most ground in the least time. Totally oblivious to the little boy running towards his mother.

The boy heard the roar of the engine too late. There was nothing he could do except turn away and cover his face instinctively with his hands, the commonest reaction when a human is face with any kind of threat. The car also had no option of slowing down, and even if it did, it didn't look likely the driver would take it. In a moment of blurring motion, the car dropped its left tires, both front and rear into the puddle left by the previous night's rains, covering the little boy in a mixture of water and mud, and sped on.

The boy looked up after the car passed, and gingerly ran his hands over his face, collecting all the mud and grime left there by the Innova. After satisfying himself that his face was clean, he rubbed both his hands straight down the middle of his shirt, to remove from his hand what he had removed from his face. Thus completing the transfer of the mud from his face to somewhere it would be less noticeable, the boy merrily ran on towards his mother and jumped into her arm.

After all, it was only one more patch of brown in an already soiled shirt.

Adieu

Life, they say, is a learning experience. Learning itself though is a life-changing experience. After having been through 21 years of it, this would seem about the right time to write a denoument for that chapter of my life. A point to stop reading and start doing. With a brief summary of how it's all been of course, the journey from a bumbling, salivating toddler to an assured, still-salivating (but at totally different things) man.

Of all the years of the 21, it's probably the 4 in college that have the steepest learning curve. For one, in college, you're pretty much on your own. You're past the totally arbitrarily-defined age where the society deems you an adult and are hence supposed to know what to do when a 'situation' arises. With this comes a freedom, one that you never had before and one that urges you to question, explore, understand and master things at a pace which you never could have before. For before now, the potter's hand that is the society and the family and the relatives was still closely around the clay that was you, restricting you from flying in all arbitrary directions so that you have one basic shape defined. That job done, the hands move away, and now the pot is ready to take any shape it wishes to.

The adult world brings with it,its share of emotions that weren't present before either. And thus form the feelings of 'me' and 'I' and other such things which are bracketed conveniently under the single category called ego. Ego is not such a bad thing, as long as it stays at self-respect. But it almost always does not. An inherent desire to assert one's views in a hall of equals is where it all begins, and there is no way that all opinions are going to be concurrent on any issue. On a minor scale, it is funny, and mostly people end up laughing. Sometimes it snowballs, and people become, well... others. And when such things happen, it's a scary, but timely reminder of how this is just the tip of the iceberg in the world that lies ahead. And at such times, you wish you never did grow up.

It's not all bad though. Experience, I believe, is truly the greatest teacher ever. You can read and listen and observe and note down a variety of things from any of the innumerable sources available to the techno-savvy person today, and yet, none of them would do anything to you as experiencing it first-hand would. Because if you don't try, you don't really know. And that is why the curve of four years of college has the slope that it has. It is a world which leads to innumerable other worlds, most of which you didn't even know existed. And you find that people of these worlds are not aliens either, they're just you, a couple of years ago, a couple of years hence, those you wish you can become, and of course, those you wish you'll never be.

The most important thing is what you take away from your experience and it is now that you take away only the good. You're still fearless, the world has still no scarred you so much that you are afraid to commit the smallest error in life, and you've just got into thinking big. Thinking big, that amazing feeling you get when your fundamental stance towards life changes from 'Why' to 'Why not'. Enlightenment is epiphanic. Experience just prepares you for it. And that moment on, you know you're ready to take on the world, and whatever it may throw at you.

There's so much more that affects you during the journey that is college life. New friends and acquaintances, trying out things you thought you could never do, going places, playing games, eating and sleeping together (in a strictly gay sense)... things you can be sure can never be experienced again. But then, that's what they say about the only thing constant being change and all that. Thus it is, that while the blood is young, the body is eager and the mind is willing to go out there and take over the world, one part of the heart knows, deep within itself, that these will be 4 years you'll never get back.

And that's why there's that lump in your throat when you realize that this is where it ends.