The Plan:
It starts off vague, a bubble of excitement, rising up in the group chat. The excitement of seeing balls of fire grazing across earth’s atmosphere.
Few hours later, the trip is planned, times sorted, I rent a scooter, I am still concerned about doing it. Deep down I know it can be done. The question I am asking is: do I want to do it?
The Journey:
I love studying systems. And the best way to do understand them is to interact first-hand. I have been on highways before, shotgunning, co-navigating and feeling in awe of the person driving, of the courage and willingness to overtake, to drive side-by-side big trucks honking their big horns, sleeper buses passing close by, covering distances over miles and miles.
We all finished up dinner, and started the trip. The night of 21st April, driving first hand, my own two hands on the two handlebars, accelerating, breaking, the stretch of road pristine and long, almost asking to be visited, to be driven over, the night long and beautiful. It took me a while to drive into the darkness, that suddenly there won’t be potholes, strays, plastics, or some human trying to cross the road on the highway. I am not used to highways, so I was still hesitant to exceed 65kmph. It takes a certain kind of nerve to be driving next to those giant night-vehicles, their big soul-startling blow-horns.
When I am not sitting in a tin box which offers some psychological safety, the scooty ride was easily overwhelming and lonely for the first stretch. And it didn’t help that my phone popped out of the phone-holder within seven kilometres of starting, the attached phone-stand became unreliable, the vibrations from the uneven terrain made the stand-screw come loose. My attention was now split between the road, the maps, the rearview mirrors and now the screw.
At the first checkpoint, we hydrated, caffeinated and attached many rubber bands to the phone-holder, a friend was kind enough to let their hair loose and offer all their rubber bands to secure the phone in place.
Note to self: Always carry rubber bands for trips!
Gradually, we all fell into a formation, the faster group went to checkpoints and waited for the tailing group to catch up and reconvene. And then we would start again.
I was part of the tailing group, I am glad another friend was tailing with me. It offered some sense of security, that someone has my back. And it was relieving to see the familiar headlight and helmet from the rearview or knowing to just keep on following this bike ahead of me, and I shall reach. We make it to the Vatadahosahalli Lake at 3am.
The Night Sky:
The night sky was starry, a bit hazy yet starry, we all gasped, shrieked and aww’ed at the sight trailblazing rocks and any moving object made the motion detectors go off, so many a planes received a false alarm shriek being mistaken for a meteor.
Sleeping under the night sky is always beautiful, and just chatting away about everything under the sun is cathartic, we talked of the Milky Way, seeing two friends awe-out at the seemingly dust cloud looking piece of universe made me feel weird, turns out it was my own ignorance. We also talked of how one friend has strong criticism on Becky Chamber’s scene description, of who gets to hate on the AI-level shallow-dialogness of Bridgerton first, spoiler alert, I didn’t get a chance. Few friends napped. Another friend made coffee on their alcohol-as-fuel-brass-stove. We caffeinated and started the return journey at 5:15.
The Journey Back:
We all made it back.
Notes:
Went from 44kms, to 54kms, to 217kms.
Road Ramblings:
We have all been there, waiting in traffic, an auto in front of us, a car on the side, and an e-scooter trying to find the exit in the maze. My claim is that the uneven spread of the vehicles creates the mental anguish related to being stuck in traffic. The anguish is fueled by the feeling of “unfairness” when scooties or autos scoot ahead. It is not the traffic itself. And that uneven spread is created by auto-rickshaws. It might sound counter-intuitive, but they are odd and three-wheeled, and create these spaces on the road like badly stacked tetris tiles. And people love to throw shade at two-wheelers trying to snake their way through but I’d like to contest that. The maze is actively being created by auto-rickshaws, as their body size doesn’t fit the tetris lego of square cars, they leave gaps.
I don’t want autos to go out of existence, I personally use them heavily, but I do want to open up conversations. If you were to take a drone snapshot of a highly trafficked lane, you can see how removing autos will rearrange traffic more cleanly.
your-friendly-neighborhood-rider,
calra
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