Driving troubles and lessons learnt

My last post was about finding a new pal.. my very new car. However, for some reason, this pal got very jittery yesterday. While driving on MG road with a few friends last night, a very bad smell came out of the engine when I pressed the clutch. We wondered what it was, but carried on. The car was jerky though. We moved a few meters and were hit by a strong rubber burning smell. The drive was so jerky, that I asked one of my friends to drive and check out what was wrong. The engine was not overheated. He started driving, but the bad smell continued to linger. It was too strong to ignore. We pulled over. Opened the bonnet, to see if there was some obvious we could spot. There was a bad smell, but nothing that my friends could pin-point. I must admit, my knowledge of such things is down there in negatives, which, I again admit, is a bad thing. Once you start driving, you cannot be ignorant about the common things. What if I had got stranded alone ? The thought itself scares me! Thats when I decided, I need to seriously do 'RTFM' on the car manual. And not stop there, learn basics of clutch, braking, engine, etc etc.. whatever important there is to know !

Found this nice link on understanding the mechanics behind clutch: http://www.dashdriving.com/tutorials/clutch.htm I now have a decent idea of what it is, and what happens when I press and release it.

So, coming back to what happened yesterday.. we called the Hyundai Road Service. They were a little hard to deal with... kept passing the buck from one service station to another. Finally, someone said that they would be at MG road in 45 minutes. We parked the vehicle at Garuda mall and waited for them. Finally at 9:45pm, those guys came. They inspected the vehicle and said that for some reason the fan had stopped working (err?!!).. and the clutch plate was burning.. eww !! Ofcourse to me those terms did not make any sense.. but enough to get me in a panic state. What I was confused about was whether that had anything to do with the way I have been driving. I did not have an answer. Anywaz, those guys assured me that I coul go home without any problem and should get it checked at the workshop as soon as possible. Somehow, alone at about 10 or so pm in the night, I, a learner, managed to reach home safe and sound ! That was one hell of an experience. I have always been uncomfortable with driving at night.. now to ad to that was the feeling that I am not driving correctly.

Now that I understand clutch little bit, I learnt that I am indeed one thing wrong - sometimes at the signal, when I know its going to be a short one, I keep the car stationary just around the half-clutch point.. eww.. sounds bad now that I think of it! I let the clutch plates pressed unnecessary. A good lesson learnt and from now on, will either keep the clutch fully pressed or leave the gear in neutral.

Had been to the workshop today with a friend. My friend found the car to be behaving very strange.. in his terms "yeh car toh ek bhudi ki tarah behave kar rahi" :-( But, surprisingly, the technical guy drove around and found that there was nothing wrong with it. We came out and my friend drove the car again. And this time, he too felt that everything was fine ! Which was and is very surprising. I too found the drive to be rather smooth and not jerky. But there is still some weird sound while driving ! Our only guess is that in the span of about 10-15 mins of that guy driving, the microprocessor somehow tuned something (I do not know, my friend was theorizing) and somehow that caused the things to be working fine ! God, I have no idea !!!!

I just need to drive around for a few days and check if things look and feel OK. If not, would need to get it examined.

The warranty covers only defective parts and not parts that get spoilt due to misuse or abuse. So, I had promptly removed the 'L' board from the car before I took it to the service station ;-) [smart, ain't I ?]. and in this way, atleast till I decide whether to put the sign back or not, I shall drive on the road, pretending to be a learned driver ! wow !! That gives a sense of immense power ! But with power comes great responsibility.. and thats the scary part.

All I now hope for is that everything is ok with my dear new car.. and that it will not ditch me for years to come !

My new pal

Wow its been 3 months since my last blogpost. Time has really gone by really fast.. a lot more has happened in these months than in probably 2 years now (2 yrs back was the last time when life changed drastically... i moved from college to office!). And the change spans across personal and professional life ! So, I moved into a new place (had been living in my old place for about 6yrs!), a great gang at work, see great new work coming my way for the next year, quite a few of my friends announced their engagements and weddings, watched quite a few nice movies, learnt to play tennis (which I now play regularly), went out for a couple of late night dinners with my gang at work, plus a music concert..and the best one - I found a great new pal !! If you are wondering what is the big deal in that, well, some of those are the things I did for the first time ;-)

This post is going to be rather haphazard, thanks to the number of things I wanna pen down. So let me first talk about my new pal. This pal got me the freedom and independence I was yearning for. He gives me a sense of belonging, he gives me the space I need to connect with myself. He has all the time in the world to listen to me talk. The only sad part is that I do not get to spend a lot of time with him. But am hoping soon I will be able to. So before you wonder who I am talk about, its my new Santro Xing, my very first vehicle, and the first for my family (and the reason am not getting enough time to spend with him is that I stay rather close to office, so not much driving involved, and not 100% confident to just go for long drives all by myself!). Bought it in September. Its a nice car, and just the feeling of being able to sit in the drivers chair is simply amazing. Didnt know driving at that time. Started learning after I bought it. The driving school course didnt help much. Thanks to Varun, who helped me out with it ! We would do long driving sessions in my apartment and once he felt I was ready to go on the roads, I started driving around, ofcourse with him sitting next to me. And then, slowly graduated to sitting in their alone and he driving right behind me ! We did that for about a week.. and then, voila! I was all by myself... Then, we went out for a couple of long driving sessions. Had lot of fun as we used to just drop by our pals places without any prior plan, had breakfast at vidyarthi bhavan, blah blah ! My driving experiences have been simply amazing! They have been a major source of entertainment for my office gang.. esp, the tea breaks! I am pretty confident now, though parking continues to be a major pain point. I suck at it, just cant seem to get the hold of it :-(

But as it is always the case with new cars, I too manged to injure it in a minor parking related accident. One morning while removing it from my parking space, managed to scrape it against a pillar that had a metal part protruding out ! Yikes.. it was a bad dent. The color came off completely. I was ofcourse heartbroken and upset. Got a lot of gyaan from people about the do's and dont's, to the extent tht I was confused about what I should really be doing ! This was within the first month of purchase. I finally decided to let the scratch be there atleast it was time for the first service. First service is done now, and my friend is back to his own original self. Unfortunate that I could not take a pic of that ugly scratch that had spoilt its looks for the first two months !

I think the other things that have happened probably deserve separate posts like this one.. which was dedicated to my new pal!

Shocking interview

(Image from timesjob)

Many job interviews are normally conducted on the phone if the candidate resides in a different location. Initially I guess people must have had there skepticism about the reliability of the process. I sure did. But, after a few telephonic interviews, I developed faith in this means of hiring, until last week, when to my surprise, the interviewee actually cheated !!

A senior colleague and I were scheduled to take a telephonic interview of a candidate with 6 years of experience in the industry. In order not to reveal any information about the candidate, we shall assume it was a female named 'A'. There was a lot of disturbance on the phone, as A was outside the office. The communication appeared broken. As always, it started with us wanting to find out about her previous job roles, projects, etc. We were not quite pleased with the answers as her knowledge appeared flaky. Nevertheless, we continued to probe. During the entire time, we not even in our dreams suspected foul play. We blamed her repeating the questions after us, he broken answers, her confused thoughts, her switching from one line of thought to another, etc, etc. to the poor communication link.

The interview was not going on well. Then came our final question. Which, as before, she repeated. And then, we heard a voice in the background that had some key words from the question. Fortunately, I could catch that in no time. We immediately put the phone on mute and exchanged glances. We knew what was going on. There was a pause for a while. And then started saying something, which was again quite abrupt. And now suspecting something amiss, we fired some more questions and she was a little confused. She took her own time to answer. And to our surprise, she went from one direction to another, 180 degrees apart. It was quite apparent that she had no clue what she was talking about. Just to confirm, we asked her a couple of more questions. And we found that there were uniform pauses after every question was asked and there were no complete sentences in her answers.

Clearly, after this, it was evident that there was someone who was prompting her the answers. She was repeating the questions to convey the same to him. The person must be writing the answers in broken sentences on a piece of paper. And in the hurry to answer, she must be just reading it out and not being able to form complete sentences. Also, since was not using her mind, she had no clue what she was saying (which was of course quite shocking considering her immense experience).

It is true that even if she was successful and did get a job offer, whether or not she is ultimately able to manage with the work, her resume could say that she worked in the company. However, this is so incorrect! What good would it be ?? Will she ever get the job satisfaction ? Will she ever be able to enjoy work ?? What about her career growth ? Well, to each his own! Quite unfortunate however.

Uncertainty!

I hate being in uncertain circumstances. Life's hell when everything around you is uncertain...your future, personal life and even the house you are staying in! And in order to avoid this, I spent quite a lot of time last year and good part of this year to figure out exactly what it is that I want from life, so that I do not have to face with uncertainty...I had all the details figured out, of every aspect of my life ! But, alas, life never turns out the way you want it to (Ok nothing new...everyone knows it). As Randy Pausche mentioned, you will always be faced with obstacles- "WALLS". There is a saying, "If you want something very badly, the entire universe will conspire to give it to you". If this is true, and you are not getting what you think you want badly, it implies that in reality you do not want it badly! Now, the thing I do not understand is that "very badly" is quite an objective phrase. You could say that very badly here could mean that "something you will die without" ? Well, need not necessarily be true in all cases, for example, I will not die if I don't get a chance to pursue my higher studies...but I know I want to do it badly!!!

While, I have always believed in "whatever happens, happens for the good", but there are times, when you think - "why didnt that happen..am so unlucky! what happens next? I am in a mess". And thats when you start thinking about why is it happening only to you...why YOU alone ? At that very moment, you are unable to see what is good in all that is going on..and lose the steam to wait for the real good thing to happen.

I wonder if there is anything one can do to avoid having to live in uncertainty. Maybe yes, not to just have one plan ,but also plan for alternatives, have buffers, etc etc..all the management fundaes. However, am not quite sure how much of it you can really apply here. This requires a bit more thought.

And the most irritating thing about uncertainty is that if it has been brought upon you because of the way society functions or your being of a particular gender..ie, due to things that are not under your control! Ofcourse there are things one can do even in those circumstances, face it and fight it..they are the real heores. I would love to fight it out...but fight whom? Society..no problem! But family and friends ? They are the lifeline. Tough to be happy after making them unhappy. And thus its a difficult decision to make. One can't be selfish. Thus you are very often told to let go...sacrifice!

Ok the above are all jumbled up thoughts in my head. And come to think of it, it all sounds like the words/thoughts of a loser! But maybe its just a passing phase..hope its the later ;-)

Element of the past...

Prior to April, 2008

Grew up seeing this building...seeing the boards...with the dream that one day I will work in IBM. Atlast when my dream came true, the sign was removed from the building! It was a very emotional moment for everyone at home when the IBM office at Golden Towers was vacated. It now bears a very desolate look..

Now

Holi Hai Bhai Holi Hai !!

I simply love this festival of colours! And many thanks to my wonderful and enthusiastic bunch of friends that this holi became special to me :-). I played after ages...last time I played "proper" holi was when I was a kid (when I used to be in Mumbai..oh I miss "Bombay" terribly on all festivals). It has always been rather dull out here in Bangalore. Not even once did we play when we were doing engineering...and even this time around, it seemed unlikely!

Just one year after engineering and the number of my friends who are single has come down quite a bit..and due to this, it has become quite tough to get people together and celebrate festivals. But I was kind of adamant that we celebrate holi...till last night it looked very very very unlikely and lo..at about 10:30 pm we got the entire plan in place and we were all set to have a blast today!

Reached Madhu's place at about 11 am. Aravind, Madhu and I spent 20 minutes shopping for colours, "pichkari", etc. We looked around for water balloons, but didnt find :-( ..but guess we didn't need them afterall...3-4 buckets were more than sufficient. Initially we were 4 of us. It was super duper fun just putting colors on each other, filling up buckets of water, mixing color in it and emptying it out completely on someone...dancing and singing the famous holi songs....pichkari fights..oh, lot of fun! It was especially fun putting colors on Dodo..she kept saying "What dirty colours...I don't like orange..I don't like green...no purple...dirty yello...give me pink..pink and pink..." No wonder people always associate pink with girls..bad Dodo :-D Nevertheless, we put on her all the colors she hated...she kept running to wash her face every 15-20 minutes...hahaha!!

Madhu was shivering like crazy all throughout..we even managed to make him sit on the ground and empty out around 2 buckets of colored water on him...good fun! and then ofcourse, he didn't leave any of us! Tired of just playing with each other, we were waiting for some other bakra..that came in the form of Neo...we waited for him....waited to pounce on him the moment he landed..and that we did...proud to say that in a very uncouth manner we smeared him with all possible colours, poured buckets of water on him and didn't give him a chance to attack us :-D But as always he was a sport!

Finally, it was time to end the celebrations...and the time to start the effort of getting the colors off..which is the toughest part of holi ;-) It took about 30-40 minutes of dedicated effort to get rid of 95% color...5% still remains on me..hoping to get rid of it in the next couple of days...

This celebration culminated with a sumptuous lunch at Pizza Hut, where Deepika joined us. And we then did what we do best..chatting !

It was finally time to say our ta-tas...quite some distance back home, close to 18 km :-) [Call me crazy if you will, travelled that far just to play holi ;-) ]

Will definitely remember this holi for a long time. Now I know one thing for sure, it does not matter how many friends you meet up with, its the quality of the time spent together that matters in the end! Its best not to expect everyone to take part..just have fun with alteast those who have managed to make it!

Holi Hai !! Heres wishing you a Very Happy Holi !! Pics with Dodo and Ara...guys, pl upload them and send the link.