TrafficView®: Awesomely solving India’s traffic problem.

Or

Where I ramble on before getting to the point, and then get really tired so I cut it short. And also use excessive commas.

Google Maps have really upped their game in India. They've added traffic information in the Metros, and are planning to bring in street view soon too. With your Android phone, you can tell where your friends (victims) are, and what their ETA of arrival to a location is. Google Navigation has come to India on Android. Maps now have a textured background to indicate topography. You can geotag your photos and people can view them on a map. And most interestingly, Google maps now even has an overlay to show the location of Wikipedia entries on your map, allowing you to see the places of interest close to you.  Both the Traffic as the Wikipedia view can be turned on from the overlay panel on the top right.

Traffic and Wikipedia overlay on Google Maps

All in all Google Maps really shows the power that technology wields in this information generation.  And also, it’s not Apple Maps. Zing.

Hold on. Let’s not be lulled into a false sense of security. Trusting GMaps has led to some awesome fiascos, like turning off a well lit and broad highway into a narrow pitch black road surrounded by fields, which goes by an innocuous name like St Andrews Path of Redemption on Google Maps, but is probably better known to the locals as Rape Lane. After turning onto such a road on the way back to Norwich from the Peak District thanks to Google, it took about five minutes for our fear to overcome our faith in technology, and we performed a hasty u-turn, leaving the axe murderers frothing in frustration down the road.

On the positive side, Google Maps have allowed us to experience wonders previously unknown to civilized man.  Driving in Wales, we decided to toss our paper map and caution to the winds, after which Google decided to show us the meaning of fear by balancing us on the edge of a cliff somewhere in Snowdonia. The view was very nice, though.  Or that time we turned off into a dirt track and had to drive for five miles followed by an angry farmer in a tractor before we found a field to turn in. On reflection, I can’t really blame Google for that; it may have been a product of a driver/navigator conflict (to clarify, I was neither).

But as bountiful as the bloopers were while driving around the UK, they cannot really compare to the magnificence of the mistakes we made blindly following our phones, while driving around the Indian subcontinent. On our way to Choki Dhani at Jaipur (more about that later) from Bharatpur recently, we put our trust in dear faithful Google. Highway, highway, highway… oh hold on; that turn looks super awesome and will get us to our destination faster than a unicorn can shit out a rainbow. ‘Dear Google’, says I, ‘you wouldn’t ever steer me wrong; let us take this turn and embark on this magical journey hand in hand.’

This was the last time I smiled for a month.

The road tapered off till we found our self in the center of a village market in a dust patch which followed the outline of my car exactly.  Google Maps had by now decided that we were in the centre of a lake, and indicated we swim in a north by north west direction. Times like these bring out the iron in a man’s soul, and I bravely struck out in the aproximate direction Gmaps indicated, followed by feral dogs nipping at my tires and cow’s scratching their arseholes on my side view mirrors.

The aforesaid iron turned out to be not in my soul but in my head, as the road took us deep into one of those Rajasthani villages where automobiles are probably outlawed by the Khap Panchayats, and old men with bright red turbans and skin the colour and consistency of tanned nutsack stared silently at us with eyes which screamed, ’We will burn you and use the ashes to fertilize our corn’.  The road grew narrower too, obviously just meant for bicycles and lynch mobs, and sparks flew off the side of my tortured vehicle as I accelerated through the enclosing walls, knowing that to stop would be to seal our death warrant.

At one point I think I drove through someone’s courtyard.

We emerged from the village like Meatloaf’s bat out of hell, leaving a few puffs of feathers to mark where the chickens had exploded as I hit them, and were soon driving through fields of sugarcane: the kind where the axe murderer hides the bodies in all those movies. 

Scenic Detours!

The road, which had long since abandoned any pretense of actually leading somewhere, was now just a mud track, and we soon skidded to a halt in front of a pit half full of glutinous clay. ‘WE CAN MAKE IT!’, screamed my intrepid navigator. ‘KEEP ON GOING!’, screamed Google.  ‘WE’RE GOING TO DIE HERE’, screamed my bladder!  And so, I reversed for ‘bout half a kilometer , past a gawping goatherd, and drove back to the highway, rejoining it a few kilometers after where I had originally turned off, thus ending both my adventure, and the excessive use of commas in this sentence.

I once used quintuple negation separated by commas in an English essay, causing my teacher to go into retirement.

So, besides these very minor inconveniences, Google Maps is great! It’s the wave of the future, and this brings me to the meat of this post, which hyperbole and punctuation have prevented me from reaching till now.

The problem: My daily commute to office involves driving from one city into another (Indirapuram to Sector 62 in Noida) across a national highway. It’s a 3 kilometer drive. It takes me an hour. Why? Because the average office going Delhi person is a crazed rabid wanker with shit for brains and the traffic sense of an autistic orangutan. The daily dose of traffic rage that Delhi brings will take me to an early grave. Though there are 4 routes to cross the highway, one never knows which route will be FUBAR by some asshole trying to go horizontally through a tunnel, or a pack of insane auto rickshaws driving in the wrong direction. The time and location of these traffic snarls cannot be predicted in advance and change hourly.

Route options for my commute

The solution: TrafficView ® - A web camera at each of the 4 route options steaming live video onto a site. Before I set out, I’ll just fire up the feed on my laptop or phone, and make an informed decision on which route will be less likely to make me kill myself.  The interface and pricing will be simple… an overlay on Google maps will show you which locations cameras are available at, and you can subscribe to a feed for a fee per camera per month.

TrafficView!

TrafficView® could also be clubbed with the route options of Google and their live traffic information, recommending cameras to subscribe to based on the destination you want. As more and more people subscribe to a particular camera, its icon grows larger on the Map overlay, indicating its heightened usefulness.

I’ve just blown your mind, haven’t I? Google, are you listening?

Car Pool

Oh, I just crack myself up.

 

Earthquake!

Okay, it's like 1 am, 18th Sep 2010, Delhi India. Lying in my bed pleasantly buzzed, watching Harold and Kumar when I feel this rocking. So either I'm more buzzed than I thought or there was just an earthquake. Nothing on the news as yet... lets see.

Mind you, I'm not discounting that the few whiskey sours I had we more potent than expected!

Update - Seems there WAS an EQ... the blogosphere and twitter bear me out. Newschannels still to pick it up. Apparently the glenfidditch wasn't as strong as I thought!

Dilli Darshan: Connaught Place at night

The Real World.

Whoever told you that a long vacation refreshes, relaxes and get's you ready for work is a dirty stinking liar. After being pampered, fed and generally coddled for two and a half weeks at home, returning to work is like emerging for a warm, cushioned womb into a dismal dystopian reality. Not that its not warm here.. oh no! Delhi's burning heat of June may be over, but the weather here has unleashed a new weapon in it's arsenal - humidity. The air is so sodden, so damp, that goldfish would probably find it salubrious. Any small exertion and you're pouring out streams of sweat and gasping with your mouth; much like afore-mentioned goldfish. Contrast that with my home in Coimbatore where an air conditioner is never required.

Add to this the tedium of office. My cubicle, which was chosen carefully for its solitude and distance from everyone, has been filled to the brim by sincere hard working drones. The person next to me, so awed by his manager, reads out lines of code to himself in a semi-panicked mutter which does much to drive away all my peace of mind.

And of course, in Delhi I am at the whims and fancies of outdoor food. Whereas at home, I am secure in the knowledge that all I have to do is turn up at the dining table at prescribed intervals and be fed; in Delhi every meal takes at least 15 minutes of keen descisions. Do I eat or skip? Do I subject my stomach to the tortures of the cafeteria, or do I venture out in the broiling sun to eat at a resteraunt? Will a bowl of musceli stave the ravening pangs of hunger or should I go whole hog on that cheese burst pizza and pay for my indulgence with guilt ridden sleepless nights? Decisions, decisions...

The Gate

I know; my blog posts have become few and far between. Instead of the words and ideas flowing out smoothly, like slick jellied eels, they emerge grudgingly reluctant onto the espace like an alligator from its mud pit. And from those rotten analogies, you know it must be true.

The reason for this is a pervasive ennui which seems to envelop me and everything I do nowadays. The only thing which I do nowdays is read tech blogs and salivate at the new and shiny bits of metal and plastic that they so love to talk about. Gizmodo is my favourite right now, with Crave, Engadget and Slashdot following close behind. I occasionally tune into Scott Adam's blog, though his output is nowhere as good as before. And when I want to get in touch with my feminine side I head on over to Dooce.

Not that I need to get further in touch with my feminine size. I'm just one Avril Lavigne song away from putting on a dress. Coloured pink. Okay, so I apologise; apparently girls don't just like pink. They like red and white stripes/prints too. Which is not the same as pink. Definitely. Not.

Ever since I've returned to India, I've been doing my very best to visit as many pubs/lounges as possible, and get as comprehensively drunk in them as possible. And no, I will absolutely not let the shame of ordering strawberry daquiris while the girls with me down whiskeys with soda and then adjust their crotch and spit stop me.

Hey, I did tell you about my feminine side, didn't I? According to these girls (they pretend to be my friends), I give off this gay vibe, which is why they take me with them to restaurants and force me to ask the maître d' for a table. Apparently they are quick to comply either from desire or terror.

This weekend involved a drunken semi orgy at home with triple distilled vodka, white rum and Drambuie and Burnout matches on the PS2. We were supposed to catch a play at the Indian Habitat Centre on Sunday evening, but on arriving there learnt that it was sold out. Apparently more people were interested in imbibing culture than we thought. So after hanging around and ineffectually trying to bribe the guards into letting us in, we decided to make our way to Khan Market for dinner.

After strolling around a bit, we decided to have dinner at Big Chillz, which, as usual, made us wait for a half hour for a table, while we stood outside the window and pulled hungry orphan faces. I have to say, patience and girls go together just like apples and Godzilla. First, Miz Kuruvilla accosted the maître d' for letting this couple get in ahead of us. The waited replied politely, 'We would seat you first, Madam, we really would, but we would lose our jobs. The couple we just seated were the owners.'


Big Chillz is a pretty good restaurant serving continental and Italian, but what you should really go there for are the delicious and indulgent desserts with mud pies and cheesecakes crowding the menu.


This time however, we decided to go to India Gate for ice cream. Quite surprisingly, there was a huge crowd at India gate. People were lounging on the grass with picnic baskets and vendors weaved their way through the crowd selling everything from bhel-puri to bubble guns. It sorta reminded me of another famous place - people on the lawns before the Eiffel Tower. Such different places, yet so similar.


The girls of course wanted a bubble gun and a fluorescent helicopter, which miz Dutt promptly proceeded to launch in a wild and erratic manner, causing everyone to take seven steps away for safety.


Of course, the battery of my D60 chose that very moment to quit on me so you'll have to be satisfies with (inferior?) shots from Shazzer's D40.

[Update - I've managed to get just two photos outta Shazzer. Rest will follow shortly]

Farewell....

So I apologise. I know I've been neglecting you all for the past few weeks. But I have a really good reason - I'm finally going home! Yup, its 1 am, and in 3 hours I leave for the airport and fly home, home, home to India.

It's been a really hectic 2 weeks, what with all the cleaning, packing and winding up in general. And so ends my fourth trip to the UK. For me not the grassy hills and lush medows. The babbling brook and riotous orchard holds no more charm for me, as now I go home.

To be true, I am dreading the 40+ degree temperature in Delhi. But but but.. I get to go home (did I mention that).

So Farewell, may we meet again. My next blog will be from India!

A Happy Easter

Phew! It's been a hectic few weeks for me. I've had to work till my eyes crossed and my hair stood up in unruly spikes from all the pulling in agony. But at least it hasn't been very boring.

A few weeks back, I managed to catch a play in Delhi titled 'Ghalib in New Delhi', which is a pretty humourous account of how the famous erstwhile Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib fares, when he visits his beloved Delhi in the year 2007. It elected genuine laughs from me, which means that it must be pretty good, as I am usually a jaded sorta customer.

I also managed to catch a few movies. Even Katrina Kaif ( who has has turned into even more of an eye-popping stunner) could not save Nameste London, which is trite and sophomoric. The Good German, on the other hand was going quite well, till they turned off the Air conditioning in the theatre, and I was forced to wake up. Now, 300, that is a movie to watch. The scenes are shot true Frank Miller style, and even the shots of blood (which, in this movie, spurts in abundance) are quite picturesque.

I have been watching some excellent movies on DVD though, starting with a real gem - Stranger Than Fiction, which reinforces my belief that Will Ferrel is a really talented actor. And of course, sweet Maggie Gyllenhaal, is there to tug at my heartstrings. Another amazing movie I saw was Little Miss Sunshine, which is sweet and weird at the same time. Go watch.

Well, I just have to wish everone a belated Happy Easter. I visited the Indian Habitat Center at Delhi to catch an easter concert, which was cancelled, and ended up watching the tail end of a very strange play, after which I proceeded to get myself drunk on Jack Daniels and port.