Need for speed

It never goes away! I feel it all the time. And there's nothing I can do to quench that thirst; the thirst for break-neck speed. Neither Blurr, nor the Flair can satisfy it. And I can't afford a CBR / GSX-R / R1 or whatever. So, looks like this is one need of mine which may never be fulfilled. :-(

The song that I'm currently playing over and over

System of a Down - Toxicity

Conversion, software version 7.0
looking at life through the eyes of a tired hub
eating seeds as a pastime activity
the toxicity of our city, of our city
Now, what do you own the world?
how do you own disorder, disorder
Now somewhere between the sacred silence
Sacred silence and sleep
somewhere, between the sacred silence and sleep
disorder, disorder, disorder
More wood for the fires, loud neighbours
flashlight riveries caught in the headlights of a truck
eating seeds as a pastime activity
the toxicity of our city, of our city

Now, what do you own the world?
how do you own disorder, disorder
Now somewhere between the sacred silence
Sacred silence and sleep
somewhere between the sacred silence and sleep
disorder, disorder, disorder
Now, what do you own the world?
how do you own disorder, disorder
Now somewhere between the sacred silence
Sacred silence and sleep
somewhere, between the sacred silence and sleep
disorder, disorder, disorder
When I became the sun
I shone life into the man's hearts
When I became the sun
I shone life into the man's hearts

Driving classes

I started my driving classes yesterday. The driving instructor is an asshole. Anyway, dont wanna talk about him. The first class was good. I was asked to control the steering and the accelerator. I was dying to push the pedal to the metal and just let the car fly. But good sense (and the instructor's foot on the brake) prevailed, and I had to supress my desire to emulate Schumi, and ended up riding at a sedate 20-30kmph.

Looking forward to completing my classes and getting my license. Cant wait to drive the Ikon. Oh, didnt I mention that dad's Ikon is coming today? It is, and I'm all excited!! Like a little boy!

Dan Brown

I guess many of you out there have read Dan Brown's (DB) The Da Vinci Code. I did too. And I kinda liked it too. But I wasn't convinced that DB was the brilliant author everyone was claiming he was. The Da Vinci Code was a well-researched novel, and I feel that was the reason for it being so interesting. That and DB's habit of ending every chapter with a sentence that was pregnant with suspense; unnecerrary suspense. It was okay at first, but as I progressed through the book, it got kinda irritating. In order to decide for myself, whether DB was a good author or not, I went out and bought his other three books; Angels & Demons, Deception Point and Digital Fortress.

Angels & Demons was the precursor to The Da Vinci Code, and was interesting. But it had common elements with The Da Vinci Code. I assumed this might be the case because both the books were about Robert Langdon. Read Deception Point. And thats when I realized that DB writes to a formula.

This is how it goes. In the prologue, someone dies under mysterious circumstances. And that someone has a secret. An earth-shattering secret. A secret which costs him his life. Anyway, while dying he leaves behind some clue / information which becomes the basis of the entire novel. And the protagonists of the story are a guy in this 40s who is a walking encyclopedia and women drool all over him and he doesnt seem to realize it cos he is too engrossed in his work; and a woman who is in her 30s and has the IQ of Einstein and the body of Cindy Crawford. These two are usually thrown together by chance and a romance blossoms between them through the novel. Every chapter in the novel ends with a sentence that conveys absolutely no information but is full of suspense. (I find this very very irritating. Its very similar to the tactic used in Hindi teleserials on Star Plus / Sony). And after a thrilling ride that takes the protagonists to different exotic locales across different continents, the protagonists somehow solve the issue, after a shocking revelation that one of the characters was not what everyone thought him/her to be. And in the end, the protagonists have sex.

Bah! I couldnt take more of this, thats why I've decided not to read Digital Fortress until I read some two or three other books. So, I'm starting off with San Andreas by Alistair McLean.

I saw something today which made me wanna climb onto Blurr and take off for a long ride. I went up to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. The coffee machine was being cleaned, so while I waited, I turned my gaze up towards the sky and saw this awesome sight; the sky was light blue, with light grey clouds arranged like parallel lines, and the east corner of the sky was turning a shade of pinkish red. Its things like these that make me miss long rides. I wonder when I'll get to go on my next ride.

Lost the fight

Sleep won. Couldn't keep my eyes open. Put my head down and slept for a good two hours (I think). Anyway, feeling refreshed now. And that's a good thing, now that I have to ride back home ;-)

Night shift : day two

Couldn't catchup on much sleep during the day. Somehow its always tough to sleep in the day, lots of distractions. Credit card people calling up, TV, and what have you.

Paying for it now. Feeling very tired. Three hours to go until the shift ends. I hope I pull through.

Funny read!

Beauty and the Beast
By Dave Barry

If you're a man, at some point a woman will ask you how she looks.

"How do I look?" she'll ask.

You must be careful how you answer this question. The best technique is to form an honest yet sensitive opinion, then collapse on the floor with some kind of fatal seizure. Trust me, this is the easiest way out. Because you will never come up with the right answer.

The problem is that women generally do not think of their looks in the same way that men do. Most men form an opinion of how they look in seventh grade, and they stick to it for the rest of their lives. Some men form the opinion that they are irresistible stud muffins, and they do not change this opinion even when their faces sag and their noses bloat to the size of eggplants and their eyebrows grow together to form what appears to be a giant forehead-dwelling tropical caterpillar.

Most men, I believe, think of themselves as average-looking. Men will think this even if their faces cause heart failure in cattle at a range of 300 yards. Being average does not bother them; average is fine, for men. This is why men never ask anybody how they look. Their primary form of beauty care is to shave themselves, which is essentially the same form of beauty care that they give to their lawns. If, at the end of his four-minute daily beauty regimen, a man has managed to wipe most of the shaving cream out of his hair and is not bleeding too badly, he feels that he has done all he can, so he stops thinking about his appearance and devotes his mind to more critical issues, such as the Super Bowl.

Women do not look at themselves this way. If I had to express, in three words, what I believe most women think about their appearance, those words would be: "not good enough." No matter how attractive a woman may appear to be to others, when she looks at herself in the mirror, she thinks: woof. She thinks that at any moment a municipal animal-control officer is going to throw a net over her and haul her off to the shelter.

Why do women have such low self-esteem? There are many complex psychological and societal reasons, by which I mean Barbie. Girls grow up playing with a doll proportioned such that, if it were a human, it would be seven feet tall and weigh 81 pounds, of which 53 pounds would be bosoms. This is a difficult appearance standard to live up to, especially when you contrast it with the standard set for little boys by their dolls... excuse me, by their action figures. Most of the action figures that my son played with when he was little were hideous-looking. For example, he was very fond of an action figure (part of the He-Man series) called "Buzz-Off," who was part human, part flying insect. Buzz-Off was not a looker. But he was extremely self-confident. You could not imagine Buzz-Off saying to the other action figures: "Do you think these wings make my hips look big?"

But women grow up thinking they need to look like Barbie, which for most women is impossible, although there is a multibillion-dollar beauty industry devoted to convincing women that they must try. I once saw an Oprah show wherein supermodel Cindy Crawford dispensed makeup tips to the studio audience. Cindy had all these middle-aged women applying beauty products to their faces; she stressed how important it was to apply them in a certain way, using the tips of their fingers. All the woman dutifully did this, even though it was obvious to any sane observer that, no matter how carefully they applied these products, they would never look remotely like Cindy Crawford, who is some kind of genetic mutation.

I'm not saying that men are superior. I'm just saying that you're not going to get a group of middle-aged men to sit in a room and apply cosmetics to themselves under the instruction of Brad Pitt, in hopes of looking more like him. Men would realize that this task was pointless and demeaning. They would find some way to bolster their self-esteem that did not require looking like Brad Pitt. They would say to Brad: "Oh YEAH? Well what do you know about LAWN CARE, pretty boy?"

Of course many women will argue that the reason they become obsessed with trying to look like Cindy Crawford is that men, being as shallow as a drop of spit, WANT women to look that way. To which I have two responses:

1. Hey, just because WE'RE idiots, that doesn't mean YOU have to be; and

2. Men don't even notice 97 percent of the beauty efforts you make anyway. Take fingernails. The average woman spends 5,000 hours per year worrying about her fingernails; I have never once, in more than 40 years of listening to men talk about women, heard a man say, "She has a nice set of fingernails!" Many men would not notice if a woman had upward of four hands.

Anyway, to get back to my original point: If you're a man, and a woman asks you how she looks, you're in big trouble. Obviously, you can't say she looks bad. But you also can't say that she looks great, because she'll think you're lying, because she has spent countless hours, with the help of the multibillion-dollar beauty industry, obsessing about the differences between herself and Cindy Crawford. Also, she suspects that you're not qualified to judge anybody's appearance. This is because you have shaving cream in your hair.

Being a night creature doesnt make it easy to be in the night shift

Yup, today's my first night shift. Didnt get much sleep during the day, so I'm pretty tired. Not much work, so chilling.

Looking forward to leaving. Wanna get home and hit the gym, the shower and the sack, in that order.

Happy Birthday!!

Yup, its been a year since I rode her out of Jatti Motors and into my life. She was looking gorgeous in her all-black paint. After riding her, everything else felt sub-standard. (That was until I rode a Karizma, but that's another story.)

I had been power-starved since college days, when I had a Hero Puch. Riding NP's RX135 used to give me such a kick. But he wasn't too thrilled about my on-the-limit riding ;-), so rides on his bike were rare. The Splendor that I rode for a year after the Hero Puch was a welcome relief. Still, 7.5 bhp was peanuts. I craved for more.

Two weeks before I got my first month's salary, I went down to VST Auto to enquire about the Pulsar. That time, there were four choices for the performance conscious buyer:
- Hero Honda Karizma
- Hero Honda CBZ
- Yamaha RXZ
- Bajaj Pulsar 180

The Karizma, was powerful, smooth, refined, had mag wheels and all that. But, no make that BUT, it cost a bomb! There was no way my parents would accept my spending close to a lakh on a bike; dad would pester me to go in for a second-hand car instead. So that ruled out the Karizma.

The CBZ has good styling, and good ride position. But, it was an old bike. And it had mileage problems.

The Yamaha RXZ. *sigh* why did I not buy that one! Well, two-stoke bike production was to be stopped. Polluting. Good only for quick acceleration. Not for long periods of triple digit speed riding.

That left the Pulsar 180. It had a nice aggressive styling, and riding postition. At 15 bhp, it pumped out double the power of my current bike. And a mileage of 40 kmpl was pretty decent. And that's how I found myself in VST Auto.

The visit was kinda disappointing, cos I was told that I do not qualify for a loan, as I was required to furnish pay slips for the last six months. I thought I could get the loan in dad's name and pay dad the money. Dad agreed.

And so, it was with anticipation and joy in my heart that I walked into Jatti Motors on the 3rd of August last year (dont ask me how I remember that date, I myself dont know). Asked for a test ride of the Pulsar, 180. They said, we dont have the stock, but you can take a test ride on the 150. I agreed. The test ride wasn't much fun. There was a very nervous sales guy sitting behind me, and I had to ride through some insane traffic. Anyway, the test ride was only a formality. I was going to buy the Pulsar anyway. I took a quotation from them and left.

After that I would call them up every week, and they would give me different answers each time. "No stock Sir", or "They've stopped production of the Pulsar 180." Little did I realize that those weasels were trying to sell off their stock of Pulsar 150s. It was a good thing that I walked out of there saying I'd rather buy a second-hand Pulsar 180 than a Pulsar 150.

Come September and there was news that Bajaj was coming up with a new version of the Pulsar, the DTS-i. I was very excited, especially because the new Pulsar was more powerful and offered more bang for the buck. Started calling up Jatti Motors again, asking them when the new bikes are expected. Never got a positive response from them. One day while returning from office, at a signal, I noticed the bike in front of me was a new one, one that I hadn't seen before. Moved closer for a better look and noticed the distinctive lines of the bike and the "150 DTS-i" decals on the rear panel. She was a beauty!!

More calls to Jatti, but always there was some problem or the other; either the 180cc bike wasnt available, or the color of my choice (black) wasnt available. Finally, after a loooooooooooong wait, I got my bike on the 4th of December, 2003. I personally rode the bike to the RTO for the registration, because I didnt want any of the showroom fellows to rip my bike. Fell in love with her the moment I thumbed the starter. And I'm still in love with her.

Some stats:
Total distance covered: 15.7k kms
Best Mileage: 58kmpl
Worst Mileage: 30kmpl
Mods made: New paint job, FKR Ranger2 120/80 * 18 rear tyre, Sigma fitted. Currently, Venkat is working on a twin-headlamp for her, also re-wiring the circuits to DC.
Longest trip: Bangalore - Mangalore - Kannur. 1325kms
Longest solo ride: Bangalore - Shravanabelagola - Halebeed - Belur. 480kms
Punctures: Two. Incidentally, this is my first bike on which I'm facing punctures.
Accidents / Falls:
1) On my way to Munnar, riding at walking pace, cyclist cuts across onto my path, brake hard to avoid hitting him, was on sand, skid and fall
2) Someone droped a Thunderbird on her in the parking lot at office, ugly dent in the tank.
3) While taking her off the stand, I accidently let her hit a switchbox in front of the bike. Crack in the fairing. Patch it up with cellotape.
4) Rear-ended a Tata Safari, multiple scratches on the front mudguard
5) Some drunk drops his scooter on the headlamp. Broken headlamp. Still riding around with it.

Long post. Hoping for many more years of fun and happiness with Blurr.