Of activity logs and women drivers

There’s something inherently satisfying about reading that something you gave so much of your time to writing faithfully everday of your life for 3 years, with seemingly no reward but for seeing that all those HTML pages made your page rank first in a search for ‘Ravi Pratap’ on Google, has actually meant so much to different people. The activity log that I began writing in April 2000 has given me, from time to time, a reason to smile. To feel happy that it meant something dear to somebody else too. For some of them, it was a record of not just my life but theirs too. It sometimes celebrated their achievements and sometimes shared their grief. Rahul’s latest blog entry talks about one such perspective.

But all this has stirred me into action. I really must try to write as often as I can. And I must continue to strive to record all that transpires, in as much detail as I can because I know someday in the future, I (and possibly others) shall look back at these days in St. Louis and laugh about all this

The weather here in St. Louis is schizophrenic, to say the least. As one of my labmates, Stephen, put it, “Oh it knows exactly what it is every single day. It’s just that they aren’t the same person !” The first half of the week was spent wearing a sweater and muttering about temperatures in the 30s when it was the second week of April and now on Sunday, I am already beginning to wish it wasn’t quite so hot already !

The weekend was a good break from routine. I shudder to think what life would be like for us adults if we all had one-day weekends like most school-going kids in India [I wonder how it is here in America]. Anyway, among other things I went shopping with nOnda in the afternoon – I wanted to buy a blazer or two (apparently there was some really cool sale on). We found some really good stuff and I got two for the price of one ! I must make it a point to use a woman’s instinct when it comes to sales to save myself some bucks

In the evening, nOnda invited Vidya and me over to her house for dinner. We had some awesome channa masala with parathas while watching ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.’ Now for those of you who haven’t seen this absolutely adorable little children’s movie, I recommend you go grab the DVD and watch it now. Although I have seen it at least 50 times back when I was in school [we had the tape at home], last night was the first time I saw it in years and I loved every minute of it. nOnda was particulary pleased to play the hostess and see that we all were enjoying ourselves so much Udaya called later that night and told me how she too had played hostess to a bunch of friends at her university and that they enjoyed her cooking – good for her

Another activity that I happen to be involved with of late is something quite noble a cause indeed. It involves teaching women to drive properly on the roads with a special effort on being as little a traffic hazard as possible Ms. nOnda is currently under my tutoring and today we had another session in which I taught her perfect parallel parking. The interesting thing is that nOnda is perfectly aware that driving is not something that comes naturally to her ["Heck, I am no engineer, man ! I don't understand machines."]. Why, she seems even more enthusiastic than me in verbally bashing women and their reputation for being bad drivers !

This evening, though, nOnda, in a fit of nervousness [and understandably so, considering I was breathing down her neck, sitting next to her] took a left turn at a signal and continued driving on the left side of the road with traffic heading right at us ! After some frantic shouting from me, we were back on track but those were some tense moments.

I can’t understand why they don’t have this system of L-boards here in the US. In India, one hangs a board with a huge red-lettered ‘L’ on it, at the back of the vehicle when it is being used to teach somebody how to drive so that other motorists are warned about the potential danger

Anyway, to be fair to nOnda, she is learning pretty fast and seems right on track to take her test in a few weeks. Just that I am beginning to think we need special signs which say ‘W’ in a large Serif font to warn people that the driver is a woman

And to bring to an end this post, I might as well do the vanishing act before all the women out there are out to strangle me !