Why Ken Block is not a circus joker

This is an era of posers. The people who can pretend to be good and pull off a few moves to their credit. The people who can gauge your nonchalance towards the real. The people who can lie to themselves. Surprisingly, because the percentage of such people is steadily growing thanks to the moronic nature of social media and your alter egos on the web, posing has become mainstream.

You may not be liked by the people at work with because you didn’t bother to ask them about the utterly nonsensical deep quote they posted yesterday night. You may not be considered to be ambitious because you do not cry those eyes dry when you err. But eh, that’s not the point. The point here is Ken Block.

Well, coming to the jokers – the jokers are probably one of the most talented artists out there. Making people laugh is not a joke – especially when you cannot speak a word. I know. I know. Rahul Gandhi has that unfair advantage because ‘sab jaante hai uska baap kaun hai’. But on a serious note, the joker has to have a repertoire of tricks up his sleeve, the tricks which he has mastered. Well, he has to master them because you have to pull out a trick to match the mood and constantly read the crowd and not waste a moment on the trick itself.

You might be thinking that apart from the headline, I have mentioned Ken Block only once and gone all about posers and jokers. Am I trying to establish a correlation between the three? Hell yes, I am. Yes, I cannot even properly drive a car. But being born in India, I have the divine right to judge. Like we tell Sachin how to play out the nervous nineties.

And I pass that judgement for my own reasons. Ken Block is an immensely skilled driver. No two ways about it. The kind of car control he displays is flabbergasting and kind of stunts he pulls off is mind-blowing. But then that is the catch. He, methinks, is a master of stunts. My definition of a great driver is largely influenced by my Youtube education in Group B rallying. The way the Vatanens and the Mikkolas ran riot in those death traps is the mark
of a real driver.

The pedigree of a driver, methinks, is defined by the ability to sustain unrelenting assault of pure pace over a distance where your body wanes out towards the end but you still do not cut pace. And here is why Ken Block’s Race of the Champions or RallyCross wins do not count for me. The ultimate proving ground for him is WRC where he has failed to succeed at the highest level more often than not.

No doubt the Gymkhanas are a visual treat, a wow thing for those who do not feel the nuances of the art of driving. And I am immensely pained when a young kid comes up and says, I will be a great racer like Ken Block. Has it all boiled down to what a good show I put up?

5 things that are wrong with trucks in India

Main Nikla, o Gaddi leke,

O raste par, wo sadak pe,

Ek mod aaya,

Mai utthe truck chhod aaya.

What? Something’s wrong, isn’t it?

Well, this is what most truckers go through quite often in their life.

We all curse those laggards occupying the fast lane, crawling along the tarmac at sub-zero speeds. We shout at them for slowing us down when we are out on a leisurely drive in our air-conditioned cabins replete with touch-screen systems playing the music of our taste through the iPods. We despise them for ruining our triple-digit speeds as we sip on the Starbucks coffee that we proudly shared over social media for the red cup!

Well, I am not making a white-collar uber-rich and largely liberal and tolerant demon out of you. What I am going to bring to you is the plight of those truckers that bring to you that red cup, that iPod, the fuel that you tanked up in the morning. I am still one of you, albeit a little bit changed, after my brother handed me over the keys of our brand new 40ft trailer truck, the first one for our logistics start-up. Though I still curse them under my breath, I feel their pain. The pain the tablet wielding generation would feel when they are given a Nokia 3310 as their first phone instead of the iPhone 6S.

Truckers drive the economy yet are the people that have been conveniently excluded from the benefits of a growing economy. They drive our roads, bad roads, no roads or whatever to bring to you your daily supplies. Trucks, almost till the last decade, were being built on the designs drawn before independence. Even the driving seat was not any more comfortable than the most basic bar-stool.  

We need trucks that drive well. Yes, we do. They should have better pulling power. While I am a crusader against over-loading, better pulling power of the truck will improve the in-traffic behaviour of truckers. Even the travel times may come down or at least offer more time for the poor truckers to rest.

Which brings me to the in-cab convenience. These truckers travel millions of miles an year, living in the cabin more often than not. A nice spacious cabin that would take in their fatigued backs would be welcome. Bottle holders to store their water, an entertainment system to keep them cheered up and a fully functional dashboard that tells them much more than the speed they are doing. The cabin has to be nice cozy home for them.

The law of averages is a bitch and catches up with you every time. With the number of miles these truckers clock, they are much more prone to mishaps and accidents. Though they are sitting high up there, with so much of metal around them, they do get injured quite a bit. A lot of trucks do nto even have a proper driving seat with a seat-belt! Driver safety has to be one of the most important points for the Indian companies that build trucks.

When I drove that 40ft trailer truck within a yard for ten minutes, I knew how difficult it was to get this thing around. Also, being perched up so high, it is humanly impossible to keep an eye out for anything that may come perilously close to these humongous machines. You need to have mirrors or cameras around the truck to aid the manoeuvrability of the mammoth in tight places especially with people ready sneak in right under your nose.

Maintenance! The sword that is always dangling in the truck driver or the owner! With so many miles to churn out to make ends meet, you cannot afford your machine to break down often or to be taken out of the churn for service. Modernity in automobiles these days means more electronics and gadgetry. The essence here is to keep your equipment as crude as possible while making it as useful and modern as possible for the trucker or the road side mechanic to mend it in case of a breakdown.

I think I just went overboard with my automobile engineering, my frustrations of the ten-minute truck drive and the plight of the truckers. But being the people whose opinions may count, it is our collective responsibility to create a better tomorrow and we all know who is going to drive us into the tomorrow – the greasy old trucks. Not.