Fun in a late Sunday evening disaster.

While the trip out of town with my Mensan friends started with a disaster, the trip itself was a lot of fun, and relatively uneventful disasterwise.

Or so I thought, as we re-entered Bangalore, with home calling out to us.

Near the Yeshwanthpur junction, we were following a maroon WagonR, which had several dents on its back. Occupants in my car remarked how it looked fresh out of an accident, with green paint still visible on some of the dents.

Even though there was moderate traffic, it was flowing at a reasonable speed of around 60 kmph.

As we crossed the Yeshwanthpur signal, the WagonR in front of me decided on its own volition that it was time to stop. This decision was taken when it was several meters out of the signal's stop line, which even I had crossed while it was green. What probably confused the poor bloke was the fact that the orange light was out in the signal in front, so when the signal changed from green to orange, he got flustered (being fresh out of the accident) and stopped.

Seeing him stop, I slammed on the brakes. While I was able to reduce the impact considerably, the resulting mild tap from my (huge) Safari on his (tiny) WagonR was enough to shake things up, to say the least.

This is where the fun starts.

Dazed by the impact, I started to reverse my car. In doing so, I touched the Scorpio which had screeched to a halt behind me. The owner of the Scorpio promptly got out and started to scream at me in not so pleasant words.

As he was doing this, I brought his attention to the WagonR in front of me, which, as we were speaking, was reversing and banged right back into my Safari which had spared him too much damage only a few moments ago.

This is where the crowd started having fun.

The crowd, which has not really received due mention thus far, had already collected, and a couple of people were screaming themselves hoarse from the sidelines. The ironical part is, even the cars were not damaged, apart from a few scratches, let alone human damage, and the screaming on the part of the crowd was totally uncalled for. But then again, who calls for such things to begin with?

The traffic police had, by now, involved itself in the affair, and had collected my license and surveyed the damage, all in the space of the 90-odd seconds before the signal opened again. They told both of us to wait after the signal where they would come and settle things.

Obviously, the traffic policemen had started having fun.

We went past the signal and halted. I noticed the Scorpio guy halt a few meters ahead of us to survey the situation and to see if he could extract any advantage out of the situation. Seeing the police headed towards us, he obviously decided that the non-existent damage to his car was not worth getting involved with the police for. Pretty soon, he grew wise to the situation and headed off.

Meanwhile, the 5 of us got out and started arguing with the middle-aged male driver of the WagonR. While he was pointing at a dent presumably caused by my car, Sundar calmly pointed out that the same dent was too low to have actually been caused by the Safari, which, obviouly is slightly on a higher side, vis-a-vis suspension. When he tried to point at a higher dent, Pradyot pointed at the green paint which was fresh on the dent, which could obviously not have been caused by my black car with grey bumpers.

At this point, the fun went out of the other person's life.

He started on the track that he doesn't want to get into a haggle with the police, and was ready to leave. Several factors could be the reason for this sudden change of mind, some of which we only noticed afterwards.

1. He was a non-kannada speaker. Had I been alone, I would have wanted to avoid the police myself, being a non-kannada speaker. However I had the benefit of two native Kannadiga passengers and was willing to fully exploit the situation to my advantage.
2. The previous accident had broken off a part of his car's rear number plate. If the police had noticed this, they would have screwed his happiness from here till kingdom come.
3. He must have remembered that after green, the signals go orange for sometime and not red as he had thought previously, at which time, you are expected to go through, if you've crossed the line and stop otherwise. The site of the accident was obviouly on the wrong side of the line, and by connection the law.

Nevertheless, since the police still had my license, I was in no mood to let him go unless he retrieved it from them. This he agreed to do. We waited for the policemen.

When the policemen finally reached us, he had this sudden turn of thoughts and started pretending that the policemen were on his side and frantically started pointing at the various dents. Luckily for me, the policemen themselves were only Kannada speakers, so they spent most of the time talking to Sundar. Sundar handled them admirably, with all the tact of his age and experience, and pretty soon, we figured that the policemen were looking at the magnitude of the dents for their bias. When pointed out that the dents were obviously relics from a previous accident and had no connection with my car whatsover, they turned over a good leaf and they asked us to mutually settle it as we saw fit.

This is where Sundar started having fun.

Having got the WagonR driver in a position he wanted, he wanted to ensure that after moving away from this place, no other hit-and-run case relating to this accident may be filed (considering that the police had both our vehicle numbers). He asked the police officer for an assurance to that end. As it happens, the police guy was unwilling to provide any assurance to that effect. The only way to go about getting that assurance was if we would make a trip to the nearby police station, and file a letter about the compromise with the police.

I was ready for this. The other driver wasn't. There ensued another bout of argument to convince him to see this point of view. Anyways, we soon headed to the police station. By now, most of the tension of the accident had eased, and we only wanted to get away from there asap.

Sitting in the police station, while the inspector was writing out the letter, I started getting fidgety and started fiddling with some random papers on the inspector's desk. Before long, Pradyot whispered in my ear to make me stop.

For most of the people with me in that car, this was the high point of the whole episode. Everything in that situation was stacked against me:

1. I was not a localite.
2. I had the bigger car, and by common-sense logic (or should I say mob logic), was obviously at fault, no matter whose fault it really was.
3. I was the younger driver, aged 23 as opposed to the 37 years of the other driver. By this assumption I was obviouly the more immature driver, even though he had more dents in this car.
4. Because of 2 & 3, I must have exuded a rich, spoilt brat image, something I've been striving to achieve since a long time, inspite of it being entirely untrue.

After all of this, a mutual compromise was probably the best thing that I could have asked for. I should have been thankful to God for that and all that, and the way I went about expressing this thanks was by fiddling with the papers on the inspector's desk?

The trip ahead was mostly focussed around this aspect, and the other gory(?) bits of the accident were more or less forgotten. We all had a lot of fun. :)

For reference:
Cars referred to in this post:
Tata Safari Dicor
Maruti Suzuki WagonR
Mahindra Scorpio

People in my car:
Pradyot, Sundar, Mayur, Saikat and ofcourse myself.

Early morning disaster.

Typically, I stay away from early mornings. Honestly. I've gone to the extent of refusing early morning meetings at work because of my fear of the morning sun.

On that fateful day however (last saturday, March 11th, 2006, approximately 6 am to be precise), I was one of the two in favour of departing early. This had something to do with me being one of the two drivers for the trip and naturally supporting the grandiose plans of beating the Bangalore traffic by leaving early.

So, just as I was getting into the bath, removing my spectacles, I heard a loud snap, followed by a crash and a shatter.

Fearing the worst, I located my spectacles. They were in my hands. I put them on. Something didn't quite seem right.

I looked at the floor. I could see piecies of broken , rather shattered glass. Dangerous. Something wasn't quite right.

If I had my glasses on my nose, what were pieces of glass doing on the floor? I didn't have any memories of having dropped them recently, and I'm not the kind of guy to throw them around in fits of anger, besides I couldn't recollect any such fits in the last few minutes.

I took off my glasses and looked at them. Turns out that one of the screws had given way and the lens had fallen down. The screw, though intact, had caused the snap while giving way, and the glass lens was responsible for the subsequent sounds.

While I got a towel on and swept away the glass pieces, I got philosophical about why an old and faithful pair of spectacles would give up on me, especially looking out on a nice 500 km drive on some awesome roads, when I would depend on them so much?

I had a couple of thoughts:

1. My spectacles were jealous of my spanking new pair of contact lenses. While I'm not really used to the contacts yet, I've started leaving my good ol' glasses home on several occasions, especially when I'm headed to parties.
2. The weather. It has been getting warmer in Bangalore recently, which caused the lens to expand and hence cause the screw to give way. Why only one glass, and not the other? Because I have different power in both eyes, and the right lens is significantly, repeat significantly thicker than the left lens. Do the physics. Thats why.
3. Wear and Tear. Maybe they just got old and gave up. This is the most unlikely possibility, because I've had other spectacles for longer time periods and have never had them behave like this before (i.e. lens falling out before other forms of damage).

Yes, I wore contacts through this two day trip and have been on contacts ever since. The upside is that I'm now getting used to wearing the contacts on a daily basis because I don't have the fallback of the glasses any longer. Eat your heart out, old broken pair of glasses.^*

^*But I'll miss you anyways.