I’m a girl and I ride like a lunatic

I took my sister on a ride yesterday on my Scooty Pep+. It was the usual ride from my house to hers – one kilometre long. We’d done this ride a thousand times.

This time, however, she suddenly exclaimed at my riding. “Why you riding like a lunatic? I’m in no hurry and I don’t want to die. Ride slowly. I hate people who ride like this,” she said.

In another 30 seconds, while still in motion, I took off my helmet and kept it at my feet. Again, she showered me with some cuss words. “This is how people have accidents. Continue doing all these antics while riding and go crash into a tree!”

That’s when I realised I had started riding like a boy.

I’ve been riding in Bangalore for the past 10 years. Malleswaram, Vasanth Nagar, MG Road, Koramangala, Jayanagar, JP Nagar, Kanakapura Road, Bannerghatta Road, Bellandur, Hebbal, name it, I’ve been there on my 85 cc bike. I’ve mastered the art of weaving in and out of traffic. All this with zero accidents. (Yes, touch wood.)

On my Scooty Pep +. Picture courtesy: Komalaaa :)

I’ve been jeered at, that women can’t ride, I’ve been angered by that comment, then gotten over the anger and have eventually seen a few girls behind the wheel and thought, “Ok I guess women really can’t drive.”

Now, I’ve reached a been-there-done-that phase, where I couldn’t care less about what people think of my riding skills.

The thing is, even though I know that I’m awesome at riding, people on the road look at me, a girl, and think, “Oh there’s a girl riding. Surely, she’ll do something ridiculous on the road.” No matter what I do, they’re going to think it’s ridiculous simply because I’m a girl. So I take that as a license to ride however I want – whether I want to ride really slow on the right lane or whether I want to zip past vehicles by cutting across them rudely – because hey, I’m a girl and I ride like a lunatic!

Well, I could do all that, but I don’t have a general disregard for rules. So, right now, all I do is overtake vehicles, be it in slow moving traffic or fast traffic. I glide smoothly from the right side to the left and overtake trucks, cars and buses alike. I ride like most of those boys that sit on the back seat of a Dio or Activa and stretch their legs in front of them.

It’s actually very liberating to do that and to get told that I ride like a boy. To stand out of the stereotype that girls can’t ride. In fact, I’ve been told that before too. When I used to play football in college, my coach once told me, “You play football like a boy!” I beamed at him. In fact, I was so happy that I came back home that very day, opened my diary and made a note of his compliment.

Now, I’m not saying that girls suck at riding or at playing football. I’ve seen girl footballers that can run circles around defenders or execute neat freestyle moves. I’ve also seen girls who can pull off some wicked stunts while driving (only in videos). But these girls are rare to find. Anyway, I’m sure all girls who have been riding for years in India will relate to this.

The thing is, I’ve always battled with myself about whether I should feel happy about being told I’m like a guy or whether I should be all feminist and get pissed about it. But no matter how much I try to get pissed at the statement, I don’t. Well, it depends on what the compliment is for. If someone tells a guy that he multi-tasks like a girl, then he should be very proud. On the other hand, if someone told me that I carry myself like a guy, I’d be very sad. So, that’s kind of what I’m talking about.

Being classy on an RX-100

I like being told I ride like a guy. Since I apparently have the skill, I have now started riding an RX-100, my dad’s newest buy. Well, it isn’t a new bike, obviously. I’m sure it has been owned by at least six people before. My dad is the master of buying second, third, fourth, fifth-hand things. After buying them, he repairs them, paints them, modifies them and makes them as good as new.

And guess what! It took me just 90 seconds to learn how to ride the motorbike. It’s so simple! Even my friend, Nisha, took 30 seconds to learn to ride a Bullet!

So, once I figured out the bike, my first question to my dad was why girls don’t ride motorbikes. Just why?

It’s so liberating! That krranng sound when you kick-start the bike, the smoothness you experience when you shift to third gear, the idea of laughing at lameass guys who ride dabba motorbikes, it’s amazing!

I really think girls should start riding like guys, and start riding motorcycles too. I want them to be revolutionary, so much so that a few generations later, men should be complimented that they ride like women. (Actually, if someone told a guy, “Dude you ride like Swathi,” then it’s already a compliment. Haha!) I wish there are more girls who’ll take that extra step and be awesome at this seemingly male-dominated skill.

Nothing can make you feel more independent and awesome. Trust me.

So, come on girls! Time to be badass!

Bangalore, I hate you. Not-Yours Sincerely, a commuter

This incident occurred on St Marks road today, where half the road has been dug up and not been restored. Every evening, this road, which connected to the Cubbon Park Road gets impossibly blocked.

When I was coming back from work, there was a wailing ambulance caught in the mess. No, this is not a story of how the traffic magically created a path for the ambulance.

Vehicles swarmed in front of, behind, and beside the ambulance, using it as a bait to get through traffic quickly. Vehicles honked, the ambulance continued to scream and people yelled. It was chaos. The overlooking signal turned from green to yellow to red as usual, as if it didn’t care about a thing in the world.

All of a sudden, the wailing siren stopped. The red and blue lights of the ambulance went off. The honking stopped. People stopped shouting. There was an eerie one-minute silence.

The patient was dead.

Isn’t it sad?

Isn’t it sad that you’d completely believe it if such an event actually occurred? I highly doubt that a Bangalorean is going to read that and say, “No way! That’s impossible!” because, let’s face it, it’s not impossible.

You see, I’m a positive person most of the times. I try to see the bright side of things and would probably walk around whistling the tune of Don’t Worry, Be Happy. But traffic absolutely breaks me down. It’s not just traffic; it’s city life in general.

People skip signals, honk their arses off, ride on pavements, text while riding, throw garbage on the streets, spit out of buses/autos, speed and weave their way recklessly through traffic, don’t care about lane discipline, smoke in public giving innocent people cancer, illtreat stray animals and have a major disregard for others. The worst part is, it’s not some illiterate people who do all this. It’s well-educated people, much like you and me, who think they are too cool for rules. They have the “Everyone is spitting here. What difference does it make if I also spit here?” attitude, which I can’t stand. There are a million people in this city, who think they’re better than the rules, and if every one of those million people learns to co-operate, then this city would be a much better place to live in.

A few years ago, I couldn’t even have imagined myself saying this, but I hate Bangalore. There, I said it. The weather might be nice and everything, but there are other places with similar weather, maybe on the outskirts of Bangalore. But the main city part, I hate it. Every evening, when I ride, I wish I could borrow Shiva’s third eye and turn everyone into ash. I wish I could be evil and put all honkers in a gas chamber. Oh how I’d love to watch them burn! That’s how much the city infuriates me. I have to dodge spit, cigarette smoke, pee and poop from trains on railway bridges, and dark black smoke that comes from vehicles of those who have no concern for the environment or other peoples’ lungs. Even on cool days, one ride in traffic is enough to burn you with the chloro fluoro carbons coming out of AC cars. I was just thinking, some people thought Bangalore was hot, so they used AC. Now everyone uses AC, so Bangalore is hot. When I ride to work on Sundays, the temperature all around is at least five degrees cooler because there is no traffic.

Everything just sucks. People are not friendly. All they have to offer you is an annoyed frown. But maybe it isn’t just Bangalore. Maybe it’s all cities. I lived in Chennai for a year, but it wasn’t this bad. Maybe I lived on a highway and didn’t experience much city drama.

I have decided that I’m going to move out of the city soon. I want to live in the country side where there is peace, greenery, friendliness and silence. Precious silence. Until now, I’ve never had a bad experience with farmers or anyone on the country side. Every time we go on road trips, we stop where people are harvesting, or where sugar is being made, and the farmers there always invite us with broad smiles. I remember I went and helped some ladies harvest potatoes and they were so thrilled. They even gave me a bag of potatoes, despite their lack of resources. It’s so heart-warming. “There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor,” says Gregory David Roberts in Shantaram, which I find to be so true!

Even James Herriot has made me want to move to the country side. This is the line about him arriving in Darrowby – “There was a clarity in the air, a sense of space and airiness that made me feel I had shed something on the plain, twenty miles behind.  The confinement of the city, the grime, the smoke – already they seemed to be falling away from me.” 

Sigh…

I can’t wait to find my Darrowby.

Sorry about this negative post. Just had to vent it out.

All for a few sMILES

I just returned from the most perfect bike ride.

Wait. Before I type anything else, I want to let out a great “Haaaaaaaa!” (That’s a loud, dramatic, exuberant sigh of relief).
Boy does it feel good to write on my blog again!

Yes, so as I was saying, the most perfect ride.

Scooty Pep+ – Check
Evening time – Check
Homely streets of Malleswaram (No traffic signals) – Check
50 kmph – Check
Clouds and tiny, scattered drops of rain after a hot noon – Check
(The most cliched) Smell of rain – Check
Wearing shorts – Check
Sleeveless top and no jacket – Check
No helmet – Check
Let my hair out – Check
Happy because my hair is really short and I don’t have to tie it so it doesn’t get knotted – Check
Singing out loud, not caring about fellow riders – Check

Every single one of those aspects was equally important to make my ride perfect.

That ride ended within a kilometre. Just saying.
The happiest moments are indeed short lived.

It’s not like I’m unhappy when I generally ride. But I have to resort to doing things like this.

This was the beginning of my week-long social experiment

I’m not sure whether I’m blogging about it because I did it, or whether I did it so I could blog about it. I’m confused about that these days. This social experiment started simply because I went to a stationery store for something, and happened to see a slate. I had almost forgotten that slates existed. Usually, little children would remind me of them, but now my niblings doodle on tablets, so they’ll never experience the magic of a slate – of being able to carve something so solid onto a black board and make it disappear with nothing but the swish of a wet sponge.

So I bought a slate and some calcium sticks and for a few days, just drew something and kept it at home.

One fine day, I mustered the courage to write something on it and put on my bike. So I said, “Don’t honk, ok? Please?”

I actually wrote that message after a lot of thought. Should it be “Don’t honk you a**hole!” or “Don’t honk. I’m not blind. I can see you coming.”? Finally, I decided to go about it nicely. It kind of worked. People didn’t honk. But i’m not sure if it was because they were so distracted by the fluorescent slate and forgot to honk, or if they actually paid heed to my words. Either way, it worked.

Throughout that week, a series of messages followed. I figured it was the most organic way to reach out to people and drive some sense into them (pun intended) .Well, I didn’t go about preaching things. I was just trying to keep the air around me positive. And it magically was! Messages like these don’t fail to make people smile. Be it the Oh what an attention seeker kind of mean smile or the What a silly girl  kind of skeptical smile or the genuine Awwwww so sweet kind of happy smile. In this case there is also local baays getting their cheap thrills going, “Machaa nodo! Eno bardiddare!” (Hey mate look! She’s got something written there!)

Here’s what the messages looked like.

After the Earth cooled down

So when I had smileys like this, with such cheesy messages on them, it was really important that I keep my cool as well and not lose my temper on the streets and smile back at anyone who smiled at me. This was easy on the day it rained, because it was a pleasant ride. But when I put a message like the one below, it wasn’t so easy to be cheery.

It was most people’s weekend, but not mine

I work on weekends. So I was mostly making other people happy reminding them that it was their weekend. Two bike riders caught up with my Scooty (ok fine, slowed down to stay alongside my Scooty), and asked me what special I had planned for the weekend.

Actually, people came up to me and spoke on every day that I had a message, not just this one. And they’d all come and speak right in the middle of a ride! They wouldn’t even wait for a signal. So I’d have to concentrate on riding and fail to give them a witty answer like, “Isn’t every weekend special?” or something. I just smiled, shrugged and said, “Nothing really.” That’s the mother of all boring replies.

But there was a large sector, that didn’t understand my English messages. They’d come up to me and ask me what’s written on the slate – Auto rickshaw drivers. This message below was for them.

To cater to the kannada speaking folk. It says, “Ride carefully : )”

Well, people smiled at that. But it was a bad idea to put that message. People thought I’d written that because I didn’t know how to ride properly and I was advising them to be careful around me. Some man said, “Medam, you can put an L board instead.” So that was a face palm moment.

And then came the toughest challenge. To be happy on a Sunday. While on my way to work.

 

That’s my dad posing. He liked the idea very much.

It was really hard to keep a smile on while going to work when everyone was probably riding to go to an elaborate brunch or something. But it had a good effect. I kept my smile on and smiling, I think, makes you feel genuinely happy. On the day I had this message, some aunty flicked her cell phone out of her bag and slyly clicked a photo of me, thinking I wasn’t looking at her from the rear view mirror. but it only made me happy. I hope she shows it to more people and they do what I did too.

I ran out of messages after a week and got tired of the pressure of having to smile all the time. And the watch man in my office building requested me to take it off, saying he was being harassed by passers-by who asked him about it when he knew nothing about it. Poor guy!

But it’s a great social experiment, to see how people around you react. And if I had the patience, I’d keep it on forever and start everyday with a clean slate.

I must be given an award for that pun.

Most recent of all, however, was voting day in Bangalore! April 17. I had to go to work. My dad, though,  made the best use of the slate. Look what he did. : )

 

He rallied around the city with it, as he went to drop and pick up my mum, who had gone for election duty.

So go spread some smiles.

Do what you can to be a good person.

Cheers!

 

Horn OK Please – 13 honks you’ll hear in India

As a person living in India, you will know how much noise there is on the streets. Even if you’re not in India, you’re likely to have heard a lot about how loud the country is, about how the country is polluted with noises you’ve never heard before. I commute to work by a two-wheeler. An hour to and an hour fro. And I have discovered a pattern in all the honks bouncing off of all surfaces. Here are a few kinds of honks I have noticed.

1. The Watch-out-I’m-coming honk: This is the most normal of them all. If you have to overtake someone, you honk. This is basically to say, “don’t change your lane, I’m about to be beside you for a second and you don’t know on which side.” This is mostly because there is no lane discipline and I don’t think having lane discipline is quite possible in India. You’d have still vehicles lined up on all roads and there won’t be anywhere to go. This honk goes the standard beep beep. 

2. The aggressive honk: This is most common in the evening when everyone is tired and irritable after work. This kind of honking is occasionally justified when there is a douche answering a call while riding in the middle lane or when a bone head stops at a junction, unable to decide which turn he needs to take. This honk is a blaring beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepppp!! 

3. The impatient honk: At every signal is an idiot who starts honking fifteen seconds before the green light. He also honks mindlessly when an auto has broken down in front of him and the old man driving the auto is helpless. The idiot is inevitably subjected to rude stares by me. This honk doesn’t stop until the purpose is served or is hushed by the rude stare. It goes beeep beeep beeep beeep beeep…

4. The Signal-is-green honk: Also at every signal is a person starting intently at his phone screen. Or at airplanes. Or at pretty girls. He/she needs a signal apart from the green signal to step on it and move. This is usually just a single beep. 

5. The apologetic honk: This is the honk I have been subjected to the most. See, I believe I ride fairly well. I haven’t been in any accident (except when I crashed into a little girl and she fell. No harm done. She got up crying and ran to her father who had stupidly let her run free and from behind parked card onto the main road) or I haven’t been given the finger by anyone so far. But I ride a Scooty Pep+. It has the combined horse power of a baby horse and a tortoise. So I get the occasional apologetic honk, which just means to say “hey I’m sorry, but can you move a little? Just a little? Okthanksbye.” It goes beep bip, with the second beep almost inaudible.

6. The Get-out-of-my-way honk: There is always this idiot on the road who rides like his wife is about to deliver a baby in precisely thirty seconds. While the “Watch-out-I’m-coming” is a gentlemanly way of handling traffic on the road, there is this guy who just carelessly honks and barges into your lane without slowing down. This kind of honk is generally in a pattern like beep beepbeepbeep beep beep beepbeepbeep beep.

7. The asshole honk: This is the honk I hate the most. The guy sounding this honk rides with absolutely no concern for people’s ears. He isn’t fast, but he wants to get ahead. And all he does is honk. It annoys me so bad. It goes beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!! 

8. The give-it-back-to-the-asshole honk: When assholes sound honks like the one above, I let them pass and ride behind them sounding my honk exactly like that. Hope the deaf goofballs learn a lesson.

Artwork at the rear end of a truck

9. The I’m-Home! honk: I have heard this honk ever since I was a little girl. My dad always has had his signature way of announcing his arrival. It’s two beeps on the Kinetic Honda or a slightly long beep if it’s the Bullet. It is very convenient for me and my friends when we’re up to no good at home. So it’s one of my favourite honks.

10. The scary honk: Ever experienced this before? – You’re riding and there’s a bus behind you. You turn around for a second, give the gigantic four-wheeler an apprehensive look and carry on riding. And the driver gets cheap thrills out of sounding the madly loud honk and scaring the living hell out of you? The honks of buses and big SUVs make my ears bleed. They go BEEEEEEPPP!! 

11. Tune honk: If you’re riding in India, you’d have heard Truck and Lorry honks. Those ones that have an up-and-down tune. It’s so annoying, it’s almost like the driver is honking just to show off his obnoxious tune. It goes err.. NAnoNAnoNAno. 

12. The move-it-there-is-an-ambulance-behind-us honk: This is probably the honk that causes most unity on the road. It’s the best excuse to break and skip signals. It’s basically a lot of beeps going off together.

13. The ignored-honk: Of course, there is always the honk that goes unnoticed. I’m talking about the streets’ best friends – cows. No matter how much you honk, they won’t budge. All they care about is standing in the middle of the road, chewing cud, lifting their fat tails and peeing. Sigh.

Now imagine listening to ALL of them at once.

No matter what kind of a person you are, there is always a honk you can sound.