Flying Home For Christmas, My Mother Doesn't Know

At four in the morning a small taxi with a betel-chewing driver honked his horn for continuously spurring me into action. I sloughed on my shoes and headed out the door for what was going to be the longest Christmas ever. 36 hours of Christmas to be exact.

Over the course of my trip, I have managed two ten hour flights, a seven hour layover in the London airport where Santa-clad barmen where happy to dispense my first Guinness in almost a year and a long rambling conversation on African politics with someone who turned out to be the Princess of Zambia, and arrived just in time to surprised my mother on Christmas evening. I'm writing these few lines while still on the plane, so I'm not entirely sure if there is a heaping plate of christmas leftovers waiting on the dining room table or if we might be able to manage a midnight dash to Arby's on the way home.

For the last month since I bought my ticked I have been hiding from my mother online so that I don't spoil the surprise when I show up on her doorstep unannounced. The I have been telling her is that I have been called down to write an article in Pondicherry about state of the art solar panels designed by spiritually empowered Aurovillians. When she has asked me when I might be able to make it to the states next my answers have been vague--"perhaps this, or next summer,"

So suffice it to say, when I walk through the door in about two hours from now, I expect her to be quite surprised. Last night Padma scolded me "You are going to make your mother cry."

next up, watch my mom's reaction as I walk through the door...

The Dealership Murdered My Motorcycle

This man murders motorcycles for a living.

You would think that when a customer drops a motorcycle off for repair that a dealership's standard operating procedure would include returning the bike in functional condition. That's their job, isn't it? You wouldn't expect them to give you a bike with absolutely no oil in the engine or gearbox and transform a perfectly good bike into a mechanical time bomb just waiting for the perfect time for a catastrophic breakdown?

My dead engine. It's looking forward to a life in the junkyard.

Well that is exactly what the craptastic mechanics at Southern Motors (7,1st Main Road, Gopalapuram, Chennai, +91 - 44 -55500220) gave back to me after installing a what they said was a brand new engine. After taking almost two weeks and several thousand rupees to diagnose the problem with my old engine (it was beyond repair), they bought me a well maintained used engine in a local scrap market and installed it on my bike. They even went through the effort to stencil a new serial number on the engine so that it would match up with my registration papers. When I got it back it drove like a dream for almost 100 kilometer before the whole contraption began to melt down.The stencils they used to imprint a new serial number on my new (used) engine

By some stoke of luck the bike did make it through the trip from Chennai to Ooti abd back again, but in the home stretch the innards began making a horrible metal on metal noise that sounded far too much like the final gasp of C3P0 would make before being rendered into parts.

Yesterday I posted that I would make it to a mechanic in town to get it fixed, but alas, I spent an hour this morning trying to get it running again. It never turned over. Instead I pushed it to a nearby mechanic who shook his head and said that I waste too much money on this bike. It is probably time for a new one. He said he'd have it back to me this afternoon in a semblance of running condition.

The moral of the story is to never trust the people at Southern Motors with your bikes. Not only will they charge too much for their labor, but the bike will come back in worse condition than you left it.

350 CC's of Pleasure and Pain

The 350cc Royal Enfield with out of state plates sitting outside my apartment building has been with me for almost six years. I arrived in Pondicherry on my third trip to India on a mission to make my name as a writer. I had a tentative contract with a magazine back home promising me big money if I could piece together an adventure story about taking a motorcycle from the southern tip of the country where the Arabian sea meets the bay of Bengal all the way up to Delhi. It was 2001 and before the national highway system--the golden quadrilateral that connects the metropolises on the four corners of the country--had been finished. What passed for highways at that time were beaten concrete tracks spotted with rubble-strewn potholes and homicidal lorry drivers.

At the time my sister was working on a sustainable development project in Auroville. For the previous two months she had been constructing composting toilets with a project sponsored by the University of Washington and was part of a group of about 20 graduate students, who, when they weren't hip deep in a muddy trench, crowded the illegal pubs and nightclubs that had sprung up on the East Coast Road. It was their first time in the country, but they paraded around like old hats. They besieged the small community on rented scooters, motorcycles and mopeds--kicking up record amounts of dust on the still-unpaved roads.

My first order of business after I arrived was to get a bike of my own. The word on the street was that the only one up to the task was a Royal Enfield Bullet. The guy my sister was dating at the time, a scrawny, longhaired Aurovillian named Mahesh, knew of a mechanic in the city who could broker a deal for me. The three of us--my sister, Mahesh and myself--showed up at Felix concrete shop and looked at two bikes. One was slathered in chipped green paint and looked like it had been on the road for the last 12 years without a wash. Felix said it had a good engine. The other was chrome colored beauty that wheezed a little when I opened up the throttle. Felix said I should take the first bike because it was in better condition, but I ended up siding with the shinier one because I was told that the papers would be easier to transfer into my name.

I wonder how my life would have been different if I had taken the other bike.

For the next six years I drove the bike over the width and breadth of the country. I sailed though the riots in Gujarat, over high-mountain passes in the Himalayas, urban ghettos and the fertile coasts of Kerala. At my best I could manage 800 kilometers in a day by getting up before dawn and never letting go of the handlebars until I almost passed out at midnight. At my worse--which was more often than I would have liked--I would spent hours or days at a time watching roadside mechanics dissect my engine and shake their heads gravely.

On long trips I never managed to go more than two days without some major mechanical failure. By the time I got around to swapping out the old engine for a brand new one I had already replaced just about every moving part on the machine twice over. I've left broken clutch plates, wheel bearings, breaks, pistons, oil pumps, transmissions, carburetors and spark plugs and left them on the side of just about every major highway in South Asia.

Which brings me to two weeks ago. I have been contemplating putting down the old Enfield for a few months now, and spending money that I don't have on a brand new bike or car. The bike was wheezing more than usual and every now and then huge clouds of poisonous smoke wafted out of the engine.

I took it to the dealership in town and asked them for a diagnosis. After several days of looking it over they decided that the whole engine would have to be replaced. It wasn't too expensive--about $150--but I was a little bit wary, who is to say that the new engine would be any better than the old one?

Well it turns out it wasn't. Last week I took a trip with my wife from Chennai to Ooti and Pondicherry. On the way there the brand new clutch plates melted together and had to be replaced in an outpost on the side of the road, and on the way back the bike started breathing a metallic death rattle from somewhere deep inside its guts. Padma and I were covered with grit for most of the trip and now we are thinking of dropping the bike off at a dump.

Alas, I have an appointment tomorrow morning with the Southern Motors in Gopalapuram. They'll tell me the problem can be fixed for a thousand rupees and I'll figure it's cheaper than buying a new bike and dole out more cash so the bike can breathe for a few more days.

Failing the Gender Test

Last week a strapping young Indian runner named Santhi took the silver medal in the 800-meter dash at the Doha Asia Games, just a few days later a medical board revoked her award after she failed a "gender test".

What is a gender test?

I checked online. Google doesn't seem to think there is one that doctor's can agree on. Rather, there are dozens of online questionnaires pulled from the back pages of women's magazines that tell you how mannish or womanish you really are.

Apparently the issue wasn't so clear as some doctor asking her to drop her running shorts. Indeed, it took a team of doctors with extensive pedigrees to come up with a gender diagnosis .

According to the Hindu:

An expert speaking on condition of anonymity, said that normally such cases were handled by a panel including a gynaecologist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist and a genetic expert, among others, and all possible examinations and verifications done, including any tests if necessary, before a decision was forwarded to the appropriate authorities.

Yet despite the strangeness of the test, somehow Santhi seems to have failed the same test twice. Three years ago she applied for a job working on the Indian Southern Railway and the Chief Medical officer objected to her filling a quota for female workers.

In New York people applying for a license can swap their gender with a doctor's note,but in the world of competitive athletics it seems that the issue is a little more hard and fast.

But there seems to be a happy epilogue to the story so far. The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M. Karunanidhi presented her with a check for $35,000 and a "huge" plasma television set to acknowledge her achievement.

First in Bodyhack

I Killed BombIslam.com

A few days ago an Internet troll posted a short comment on my other blog Bodyhack that caught my attention, but not because he made a thought provoking and intelligent point. The author of the comment, Brian, hosted a website called BombIslam.com that compared the world population of Muslims as an aberrant strain of HIV that could only be cured with TNT and hydrogen bombs. Brian had been posting comments all over the Internet trying to drive traffic to his site, and was surprisingly good at garnering traffic. The site had been registered only a few months ago and according to his site meter he had over 20,000 hits.

I deleted his comment, but not before I checked out the website.

What I found was a long list of videos showing cartoon Arabs in compromised positions with animals, videos of the sites authors shooting Korans with rifles and Brian wearing a ninja outfit and posing with his gun. Interspersed throughout were long diatribes about what all muslims should be killed.

Here's a snippet of their hate speech:

Islam's army of madmen rode out of the deserts of Arabia. They raped/conquered and enslaved the minds of all the people in the area and to this day more than a billion people have been infected with the mental disease we know as Islam. I urge my fellow Americans to boycott all Muslim businesses and write your congressmen to stop the billions of dollars in foreign aid to Muslim countries, stop all future Muslim immigration, and BAN ISLAM.

And then there was this passage.

According to the demon worshippers, "Allah" is the one true God. Now Allah is pretty much Satan, but Muslims have been convinced that he is God. The pedophile and mass murderer known as Muhammed(may pig shit cover him) was a completely delusional psychopath

Needless to say, I didn't really like these guys. I thought about writing them a little message saying that they were idiots, but I figured that engaging these folks in open debate would be pointless. I decided that I could spread a little good will as one of the vast majority of world's sane American by doing what I could to shut down their website.

I logged their URL into the WhoIs database with the intention of finding out who registered the site. Not to my surprise, whoever Brian is, he didn't want to leave his contact details. I did, however, discover that they were located somewhere in Arizona and they were using a service provider called Tucows to host their web space.

I found a feedback form at Tucows and sent a short message stating that they were hosting a website that was clearly proffering hate speech and was not in compliance with federal guidelines that require website owners to register valid contact information. I suggested that they shut the site down.

It was a shot in the dark, and not likely to work. While free speech is still the rule in America, Internet hosting companies have the ability to decide what sorts of content they want to put online. I was hoping that the good people at Tucows were somewhat liberal in their viewpoint and would see BombIslam.com for what it was.

Later that afternoon I received this simple e-mail response:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting the StartLogic Abuse Team.
We have addressed the issue.

Kind Regards,
StartLogic Abuse Team

I killed BombIslam.com

If for scholarly purposes you are interested in what BombIslam used to look like, there is still a Google cache of the site still up. The videos however went down with their server. If you want to send a short message to Brian at BombIslam.com expressing your condolences, or just want to say hi his e-mail address is rob1337@hotmail.com.

And so the story of BombIslam.com comes to an end. Their URL is no longer active, and a little piece of internet hate speech has been wiped clean.

Re-Drawing Resistance: Don't Miss It.

For the next three days the Alliance Francaise on College Road is the place to be if you want to see exciting dance performances, art exhibitions and film screenings. Re-Drawing Resistance will highlight amazing pieces of feminist artwork from around India and highlight some of India's most promising up-and-coming artists. And, yes, the event is being put on by the NGO my wife works for.

Here are the details:

December 1,2,3: Art Exhibition in the main gallery.

(Today) December 1, 7:30 PM: Dancing Through the Feminine: improvisational dance by Kerala's Mudra Dance Company and Padma Menon.

December 2, 7:30: Love Through Music Music and poetry by Andrea Jeremiah and Ishwar Srikumar

December 3, 7:30 : Sixth Annual Media that Matters Film Festival: short films on activism and justice.

All this happens at the Alliance Francasie, 24 College Road, Nungambakkam, Chennai 600010.

See you there.