Kingfisher and the others

Recently I had the good fortune [sic], to travel on the airline that claims to bring back the good times. After enduring many a bumpy ride on no-frills airlines, KF was truly a breath of fresh air.The crew on-board was a world apart from the standard stilleto-wielding Charlie’s-Angles [sic] (if you get the import of what I am saying) that sashay up and down the aircraft as air-hostesses. They even memorised some of the passenger’s names, and would append it to the the standard questions. I love mass customization!

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It all boils down to the mandate given by Doctor Vijay Mallya to the crew: “Treat the passengers like they were guests in my own home.” They have these little touches which are ingenious, e.g. the menu cards, and the give-away headphones and pens. Because of the menus, the passengers know what to expect in the meals and don’t have to hazard a choice on whether to opt for veg. or non-veg., something very essential if you are choosing between airline food. (Tip: Never ever opt for egg on airlines, especially if it is sunny-side up. It is invariably rubbery, and you end up being nauseous. But the cool thing was, the KF jalapeno omelette was pretty good: The spicy jalapeno made up for the cooling down, and it wasn’t half bad.)

But the ultimate Mallya touch was the TV in every seat. If you sit down to analyse it, it’s pure genius. An apt analogy for an airline passenger is a recalcitrant kid, and depending on the airline, the air-hostess could be the mother in the scenario, or sometimes the evil step-mother who left Hansel and Gretel or the witch in the story herself, who is out to eat you. When you are dealing with 200-odd such personalities, it’s potential dynamite. If you add alcohol, which most airlines want to introduce on the domestic sector in the near future, you need to have something more than guns to rein them in.

Which is why, the TV - the opium for kids - comes in so handy. It starts with the safety procedures demonstration. In other airlines, you have bored air-hostesses rapidly pulling at the seat-belts, blowing at the life-jackets, etc. etc. trying to keep up with the female on the announcement machine, the entire performance making a lip-syncing Brinty Speers [sic] performance look like a well-executed Broadway production. Compare that to Yana Gupta, smiling at you, while she demonstrates the entire thing not once, but twice, once in English and Hindi, and the fact that you can’t avoid it, because it’s right in your face. (And though it is actually dubbed, you can’t make it out. What did you say? How did I make it out then, huh? Yana Gupta speaking in Hindi.. yeah right. Even Sonia doesn’t speak Hindi that good.)

The TV extends it’s usefulness to during the aircraft as well. Passengers, esp. frustrated male ones who want the air-hostesses to fawn over them, are less likely to press the buzzer, if they have their own private thing going on; put in a few “intense” scenes, and he might not even realise the outside world exists.

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It is amazingly intelligent for one more excellent reason as well. Most of the no-frills airlines, try to recoup their losses through other revenue streams, i.e., advertising wherever they can - behind the boarding cards, in the in-flight magazine, (and you thought it was there because they couldn’t see you bored. And to think I actually read every word of all the insipid articles in the magazine I fly each time.), in front of the seats, on the airhostesses’ foreheads, etc.

Now with the TVs in Kingfisher, they have a separate channel for this. And they don’t realllly have to put up advertisements everywhere you look then because of this. You would realise how irritating it is if you have to stare at the same thing for 2 hours! Also, they can charge each advertiser much more because it’s not just a print ad anymore. And the costs of airing it? Virtually nothing for the airline. No removing of old posters and putting up new ones, no redesigning boarding cards, and reprinting everything etc. etc. Just upload the video on the machine and air the ad.

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There was some problem in the TV system in one of the flights, because the entire thing decided to restart while we were watching an intense moment [;] during the movie “Dus Kahaaniyaan”, and the aircraft was suddenly filled with frustrated guys punching their seats, cursing the system which robbed them of their “good time in the sky.” Except me, of course. No, seriously. I was in raptures, because when the system started coming back online, the screen started spouting Linux boot-up stuff. Sigh….

It was obviously a modification of the Debian 2.1 stable, made by a company called Thales (which apparently is a major defence systems company), and it was running on ancient 333 Mhz processors. From what I could make out, each row of 3 seats had been assigned one CPU, with all the 3 screens on different terminals. Each of them was running the X-server, and the entire system had been modified to take in only the inputs from the remote control. There was a video-server, which could have been a cluster, with the programs stored on it. There were 16 channels on the system, eight of them video and eight of them audio channels, which were sent out as streams on an Apache HTTP server.

You know what this means: if they work on it a little more, they can even modify the in-flight entertainment systems into a public computer terminal which you could use to check your mail or even Skype. Just imagine the deluge of business people, if they decided to do this. Of course, it would be super-slow, but something is better than nothing. Maybe they could make ports for Blackberries and PDAs as well. The possibilities are limitless!

Sadly, the movie didn’t restart by the time we landed. Now I know why Delhi is so frustrated. Batti chali jaati hai ain mauke par!

~

But, what I really liked about the in-flight entertainment system was that they had a camera right in the front of the aircraft, and you could see what was going in the front of the plane on the TV. Now this is something incredible and scary because you can see the plane going off-track when the plane lands, and the pilot scrambling to get it back: something which you would have never known if you didn’t see it.

But it is a lot of fun seeing the plane take off: one moment you have the airport wall coming really fast to crash into you, and the next you are airborne seeing the tops of trees and cars and buildings.. and then clouds. When we landed it was night-time, and you could see very clearly the roads of Delhi, and if you concentrated a little you could even make out where you were, and how the plane lands just inches away from the tops of the cars… it gives you that roller-coaster feeling.

Me.. I wanted to watch that chap who waves the plane to the right spot, with all the hand-waving. Turns out it’s pretty easy to wave a plane in. First you have to get the pilot’s attention to turn in the right parking bay, no specific protocol for that. Once that’s done, you wave the hand in the direction you want the plane to veer towards, i.e. wave the hand towards the pilot’s right if you want him to turn right (the pilot’s right), or viceversa. Wave both hands to keep a straight course, and cross them to make him stop.

And then you have to move away. But our man took out his pocket comb, and to the amusement of 250 passengers, started combing his non-existent bangs blown away by the engine exhaust. Well, you never know where your charm might work…

~

Another airline that comes close is Indigo. I like them frankly because they have this cool logo, and the planes that I have gone in, are brand new. They now have instead of “No Smoking”, signs that say “No Electronic Devices”, since all flights do not allow smoking now. They also have good sandwiches, not the sorry stuff they serve on Spicejet. They don’t even have a choice between Veg. and Non-Veg on Spicejet, just Veg. and it tastes uggh. Indigo is clever but sometimes they act overtly clever which is irritating, like when they charge an extra Rs. 50 for the seats next to the emergency exit, which is an essential for a tall guy like me on these scrunched economy flights. As a result, nobody took the emergency exit seats on the flight.

The SpiceJet guys give them to me without a peep, everytime, except if they are gone already. Of course the KF guys don’t have to do anything like that. None of their seats are shitty. All of them have ample legroom, and my knee doesn’t end in somebody’s pancreas if that chap decides to recline. Besides, who cares about legroom, when you have TV.

The best thing about Indigo is that it is never ever late, unlike Spicejet which is giving the Indian Railways serious competition in this department.

But, as a footnote, I must add that one of my friends has had a bad experience with Indigo. One of my friends brought a rather large suitcase with him on the flight, and as baggage handlers are wont to, they dropped it from the cargo hold right on to the truck… only problem: the truck had long gone from the spot where my friend’s suitcase was destined for, and it went splat on the tarmac.

They took a long time in re-assembling the suitcase, while my friend waited it out at the conveyor belt till long after all the passengers from the same flight had collected their baggage and left. As soon as the last passenger had left, so that even my friend created a ruckus, none of the other passengers would come to know, the Indigo chap comes in with a very stupid look on his face, sweating in the middle of winter, saying that “Sorry sir, but your suitcase fell.” Repeated enquiries of whether that meant the suitcase was damaged only led to more “Sorry sirs”, and personal guarantees that the suitcase wasn’t damaged, and because of this, they absolved themselves of any wrong-doing.

This is the worst possible way to handle an irate passenger in the middle of the night, and that too after you have made him wait the entire time alongside the conveyor belt, without informing him about the problem. The least they could have done was to make an announcement, right when they knew something was wrong, let the passenger vent his anger and frustration at that moment, and let him assess the damage for himself. To top it, if they even paid for the taxi fare, it would have made the passenger happy, but that is probably asking for too much.

Bangliana

One of the most funnest [sic] activities, my friends and I in Bangalore always enjoyed was eating out. Bangalore is home to some of the best restaurants I have been to, and unfortunately for our meagre income, the most expensive food on an average. So, those places in the niches of Bangalore, which serve really great food, and yet surprisingly cheap, should be publicised as much as possible. And that is what I intend to do in this post.

~

For almost an entire year, Sambit, my neighbour in J-Block had been telling us about his haunts in Bangalore, and one name that kept cropping up was Bangliana, a small Bengali restaurant in the by-lanes of Koramangala, run by a Bengali family. So one balmy Saturday afternoon, when I had absolutely nothing else to do, I decided to go there for some culinary adventure with him.

On the way there, Sambit kept on telling me that one shouldn’t be put off the by decor, since it is exactly done like a ghar ka atmosphere (homely atmosphere). It is not like the run-of-the-mill cheap rip-offs that you find dime-a-dozen on Bangalore’s streets which try to come off as posh places, and do a very miserable job of it. In fact it is the very opposite. They have got mismatched chairs, rickety tables, no cutlery, faded plates, water in old beverage bottles… just like what you would get at home It does seem a bit odd, but you soon get used to it. And the food much more than makes up for it.

We decided to check out the buffet, and the first thing that appealed to me was the price: Wonly Rs. 180. And the fare was atleast worth twice the amount that we paid, atleast that’s what you would have paid in other restaurants that I have been in Bangalore.

~

That afternoon, they had a sweet-ish pulao with cashew nuts, and raisins, a chicken curry, a fish curry, a fish-head curry, brinjal fry, a vegetable curry (which I had to leave on the plate unfortunately, because I was so stuffed.), and a mustard fish steamed in banana leaf. And as if this was not enough, Sambit ordered some mutton curry from the menu, which was amazing. Sambit did grumble midway about puris (or loochies as they are better known in this part of the country) not being available, and the gravy of the mutton curry being thin. But for me, boy oh boy, it was paradise revisited!

The fish-head curry was a new dish for me: they had crushed rohu (a common river fish) head and mixed it into a curry, so that the curry was mostly bone and shell, interspersed with something that looked like crab meat. Yum yum…though you had to eat like a minefield, being careful you don’t ingest a piece of bone. While we were loading our plates, the guy behind the food table asked me whether I had had it before. I lied, nodding my head vigorously, dropping a few confident “Of course!”s, scared that he wouldn’t give me any… imagining it was reserved for a particular cult only

The mustard fish was divine, though I had a little trouble unwrapping it, probably because I was newbie. It was made like any other mustard fish, but it tasted much better than the only other mustard fish that I had at 36, Ballygunge Place at Indiranagar. It might have been the halo effect, but it was pretty good then.

Of course, we went for seconds.

~

To finish it off, we had malpue, which was the dessert with the buffet and we had ordered a cup of mishti doi each. We were stuffed to the brim, but we couldn’t miss these.

We ate the entire lunch with our fingers, and so did the rest of the customers there, bilkul ghar ke jaisa. I was sceptical about the ghar ke jaisa factor before, but it was creepy the way the waiter brought me plastic glasses, just when I was feeling thirsty. Almost telepathic even. Bilkul ghar ke jaise.

~

What delighted me more about this place is that it actually made me wish I knew Bengali. They had recently started these evenings where they would screen classic Bengali movies, and serve their fare alongside, which I think is an amazing concept, because as an MBA now, I can appreciate what a great loyalty-building idea this is. I am sure they run to full capacity almost every time they run movies. It would definitely work with the Mallu crowd in Bangalore, if one were to screen Mallu movies and give Mallu food :).

Bangliana is in Koramangala, just off the road on where Raheja Arcade, Baskin Robbins and the new ice-cream parlour, Cream and Fudge (or something like that.). It is opposite the HDFC ATM on the other side of the road, in the lane behind the Corner House there. You could miss it easily, so lookout for the Friends restaurant, and it’s right beside it. Definitely a must-try for hard-core foodies in Bangalore.

Check out this review by The Hindu

(PS: Sambit also recommended Friend’s restaurant as a cheap restaurant for continental fare, popular with students.)

Baby Sparrow

(This story really happened to me. My sister suggested that I pen it down for my blog.)

Quite some time ago, when I was young and innocent (:P), a couple of sparrows nested in one of the emergency lights in the corridor right outside my hostel room. As you know, how noisy sparrows can get, and how violent protective sparrow mothers can get, I had to go through a lot of “nonsense” for no fault of mine. Anyway…

I would stay in the hostel during the week, and as soon as a weekend or holiday chanced upon us, we would rush back home to good food, and mommies. After being stuffed to the brim, we would get ready for hibernation Monday morning and come back to the hostel with long faces, counting the days before we would be able to taste or smell real food again. The excuse for food they served in the hostel mess… ugggh… it looked more like stuff that comes out of our body. Seriously. Anyway…

~

This particular weekend, I was rushing back home, with a satchel on my back full of dirty clothes, ready to be dumped in the washing machine. I stepped out of my room, and I was locking my door with one hand, trying to balance the my bag on the other shoulder, when… I heard a tiny tweet from where I was about to place my foot. A tiny hairless thing was tweeting on the floor. The baby sparrow had fallen out, and ants were crawling all over it. I couldn’t see the parents anywhere; it seemed the entire nest had fallen out as well, because there was a lot of grass around the place.

Now, in my tiny, innocent and only later did I realise STUPID mind, the only thing I could do for the baby sparrow was to bring it home. I found a tiny plastic bowl from somewhere and stuffed it with torn newspaper, and first, cleared all the ants of it, (which was a very, very tedious job, but it made the sparrow quiet.) put the baby sparrow inside the cup. Then I carried it through 3 different public buses, for about 2 hours and brought it home.

~

If you were my mom, you would know how much of a pain I am in the house. The amount of food, water, effort and not the least of all space I take in the house is not a joke :). And I bring a tenant, which can’t fend for itself, and will need additional taking care of… you can imagine my mother’s state of mind. Apart from that, my mother knew, I had practically killed the bird by bringing it home, yeah, but she is my mom, she couldn’t tell me that, could she?

After the initial, “WHERE ARE WE GOING TO KEEP IT?” “WHO IS GOING TO TAKE CARE OF IT?”s were taken care of, I took some cotton and stuffed it under the bird, to comfort it. It went off to sleep after that.

Next problem: What do these damn birds eat? So I go onto the internet, and I discover sites, that chronicle the growing stages of a sparrow. Quite remarkable I must say, how that blind, hairless, ugly thing, becomes a sprightly sparrow. Sparrows eat only insects apparently, and baby sparrows, more disgustingly only eat ingested and digested insects, apparently like mother’s milk gives it immunity from blah blah blah, and the sprightliness and the strength to fly apart from other things.

The one thing that was similar to ingested insect I could give was yoghurt, and I shouldn’t have given it that because it had too much water. Baby sparrows choke very easily. But I had no choice, and I would spend many half-an-hours trying to shove in droplets of curd into its mouth.

~

But the baby bird was atleast at peace now. It stopped bleating as before, and I was pleased with myself. I had saved this bird from certain death. Maybe it would grow up to be a beautiful sparrow and would be a tame sparrow, and fly around my head, peck on my ears, etc. etc.

I, on the other hand, was getting restless. I knew the curd was not enough; it was not even insect, not at all digested. It would be debilitating for the bird, when it grew up. It would be bloated and fat, more like a penguin than a sparrow. No, that wouldn’t do.

There had to be millions of such incidents when baby sparrows of this age, were taken care of human beings. I joined arbitrary mailing lists, and groups. I think I joined about 20. And I posted this situation of mine on the net, waiting for some wise advice.

~

The first wave of mails were from wives of pensioners who had nothing better to do, telling me: Oh what a noble thing I did. Thank you, but that’s not what I wanted to know. Oh but the praise wouldn’t stop flowing from these batty old women who had just learned to use the computer. Such a nice kid, where do you find such kids… it was like they were talking to themselves, in their usual coquettish, kitty-party style.

The second wave of mails after which I didn’t have to patience to remain subscribed to these groups, were telling pretty much the same things I knew after browsing tens of websites. But none of them had done this before; one even mentioned that the sparrow was too young to be apart from his mother, and it will most certainly die. That rattled me a little bit. Did I save it from the frying pan, only to put it in the fire?

But I brushed those doubts away, continued by yoghurt diet. The next day was even better, or so I thought, because I caught a few buzzing mosquitoes and put them in its mouth; some of those irritating creatures having my blood in them.

At night, I would have nightmares of the sparrow parents coming back to their nest, and finding it not there, and their darling baby missing, the mommy sparrow crying on the daddy sparrow’s wing, cursing the evil human who kidnapped their child most probably to eat it. Oh yeah, I was a very impressionable kid back then.

~

I will never forget the third day. I woke up, brushed my teeth and walked over to the cup in the balcony where I had put the baby sparrow. And I knew.

I knew that the baby sparrow was dead. It never really tweeted or twitched when I brought it home, but it was alive, and I would know. But this morning, it was different. I can’t explain it any better than this. I looked at it, and I knew.

~

I didn’t want to do anything with it anymore, but one had to get rid of the thing. A promise to my mom is a promise. And I packed it up in a plastic bag, and threw it in the big rubbish heap, praying for forgiveness.

~

So what should I have done? Now I know better, I should have put the baby sparrow in a cup, and left it in a place where the parents could approach the baby sparrow without feeling threatened by humans. Otherwise it would leave it to die, rather than get killed themselves. Anyway…

Board Exams and The Extent We Go To…

… pass them.

I happened to notice this on my sister’s table, while she was studying, and I couldn’t resist taking a picture. This reminded me of this article which talks about the weirdest superstitions of them all. Even Vicky had a superstition during college: A Perk and a Coffee. And when he started getting good marks, everybody else started imitating him.

Oddly enough, I never had a superstition. Or did I?

The Humble Kabadiwallah

Watching my dad haggle with the local kabadiwallah who buys our old newspapers and other used stuff from us, made me realise something. We are probably the only country in the world, where we actually sell off our recyclables. Nowhere else does that happen, because it is seen as social service. In fact, in the USA, it is the other way round: you have to pay the garbage-removers to actually take away your recyclables. And we, being Indians, still haggle over the price we get :D. Oh well.

Are Businessmen(*) Evil…

… for selling products that customers don’t understand? At least that’s what you would think if you read some of the news articles that came up in the newspapers during the past few months. What with some governments fining investment banks for selling them complicated products that the customers didn’t understand, some even filing criminal cases in courts.

But when you buy a product, it is understood that the customer understands all the risks associated with the product. It would be a crime to withhold information from a customer; the excuse that “he didn’t ask about it” is plain stupid. But what if I don’t seem to understand that the thing I am going to buy is going to blow up, even if the shopkeeper says it is. Who is the stupid one here? Is it wrong for the shopkeeper to sell something like that?

To even things out, the products sold by some of the leading investment banks were also sometimes designed by analysts who didn’t quite grasp what was going on. Now, if that is the case, the blame falls squarely on the customer. Not only does the customer not know what the product is all about, but even the designer of the product doesn’t claim to know how the product works. If you are stupid enough to buy the product, how is it the shopkeeper’s fault?

(*By businessmen, I mean businesspersons. )

Bangalore’s Auto-Rickshaw Drivers - Time to Reform? - 4

(In the concluding part to the 4 part series “Bangalore’s Auto-Rickshaw Drivers - Time to Reform?” (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), we discuss the problems in setting up a system by which we incorporate the auto-wallahs into firms, so that we could allow them to fix their own prices and at the same time, create competition to check the price levels.)

Of course, there would be tremendous resistance. They would immediately realise they would be losing an enormous amount of money in this venture. Entire power equations would change. It always happens when you try removing grey markets. It happened with prohibition in the US, and it is one of the main reasons why you cannot bring addictive substances into the mainstream market. There is too much money to lose the current stakeholders in the change.

This is also more difficult to implement because some of the people who own autos, are or used to be part of the government or police. But it could be done.

~

I don’t know how to do this efficiently, but the trick I guess is to use PR to your advantage. Paint the government as the saviour of the public, paint the auto-wallahs as the oppressed people in Bangalore. It can be done. That would force them to agree to the stand proposed, and would make it difficult to do otherwise; they would be afraid of losing something that image in the minds of the public.

~

The whole thing might not work at all, but my intention is to create a debate on this topic, which would probably lead to a better solution. As I said, since the situation is very similar in other metros, a simple solution once thought of, could be implemented in other cities, removing a major pain-point from citizen’s lives.

~

In this regard, I received a comment from Rakesh Agarwal, of Nyayabhoomi, who are doing an ambitious job with autos in Delhi. They have started an “Autorickshaw Star Club”, in which they are enrolling auto-rickshaw drivers who are going to much different from the run-of-the-mill chaps on the road. They are going to earn advertising revenue from advertisments on their vehicles. In return for the advertising revenue, they have to be polite to the customers :). They would also have an elaborate system of promotion, which is an added incentive for them. They estimate about 25,000 drivers to join this club by 2008.

The website also has more accurate costing for auto-rickshaw drivers than I have put up in my blog post. So interested people can update themselves there. By the way, I never intended to anywhere close to accurate in this post. I just wanted to bring out the flaws, that would help explain the fares.

Bangalore’s Auto-Rickshaw Drivers - Time to Reform? - 3

Bangalore’s Auto-Rickshaw Drivers - Time to Reform? - 3

(In the previous two posts (Part 1 and Part 2), I brought up the issue of Bangalore’s auto-drivers. Everybody has a problem with them. But they have a problem too, which we apparently don’t care about. They are running a business, but look at the amount of the regulation. They are socialist relic in a capitalist world.)

So what do we do?

Look at the current situation now. It is the classic grey market. A lot of people want to ride in autos at the metered rates, but it is not easily available. Hence, the auto-wallahs are willing to give the ride at a higher price, at a price that he sets. Take it or leave it.

How do you tackle a grey market? Legalise it! That, I think would be the silver bullet for all the problems. Let them charge what they want, and the competition would take care of the prices. We let competition take care of prices for medicines, for atta, rice, clothes, cars and even houses. Why not auto-rickshaw fares? What’s so different about that?

There are taxi companies in the city and nobody checks their fares. They do it themselves, because they know if they consistently overcharge without providing any real additional value to their customers, the customers are more likely to go to the competition. It happens in all the businesses. Why shouldn’t it happen in this one?

~

“Oh no, but they would start charging too much. They are part of a union, and they would have a strong tendency to collaborate, bringing the whole concept of competition down to its knees. Given a choice, they would keep on increasing prices, till it is more viable to buy a car.”

Good point. Collaboration would definitely destroy this idea. So let us take cues from other sectors. How do they stop collaboration there? The Monopolistic Trade Restrictive Practices Commission simply breaks it up, but there is a crucial difference here. They only regulate firms under the Company Act, so on and so forth. These auto-rickshaw drivers are one man companies, pretty much entrepreneurial ventures. They wouldn’t come under these laws. Just like the kirana shops.

But there are millions of kirana shops, and we don’t have any problems of overcharging from them because they don’t tend to collaborate. Auto-wallahs will tend to do that infinitely more than kirana stores.

~

So, incorporate them. Make them into firms. There isn’t just one union in Bangalore, there are atleast 2 or 3 major ones. I am sure each one of them would be made of many smaller subunions. Maybe we could choose a critical number of 5,000 autos. To run an auto, you need to be part of a firm, and a firm would had to have atleast 5,000 autos. So in that way, at every point in town, a passenger would have access to autos from atleast 2 or more firms.

Let them fix the prices then, the firm should be run as a company, with the auto-wallahs being salaried/commissioned employees of the firm. Once they are a firm, you can regulate the hell out of them, and come down heavily on them, if they even think of collaborating.

Bangalore’s Auto-Rickshaw Drivers - Time to Reform? - 2

(In the last post, I raised an issue which has nagged me ever since I came to Bangalore. The auto-rickshaw drivers. I even put down a rudimentary costing, and their expected revenues. And I left it with a question, not quite answering it. In this post I intend to answer it.

I forgot to address this piece for my international readers who are not familiar with autos.

Auto-rickshaw

Autos are three-wheeler vehicles (they are also known as tuk-tuks in Malaysia, I think), used commonly in metros for passenger transport. The smaller versions ply as cheap taxis for atmost 3 people, though it is not uncommon to see upto 5 people stuffed in that space. There are larger models which are usually found in smaller towns, and ply as public transport in place of buses. Auto-rickshaws are driven by a set of people who are known to be very clannish in the form of their unions. These autos are mostly rented out by the auto-wallahs from richer people who would buy a lot of autos. More often than not, these owners are ex-government officials, and a large proportion from the police. This, very obviously creates large conflicts of interests in terms of regulation, but that is not the discussion point in my piece.

These auto-rickshaws are cheap to purchase and maintain, and hence very popular in developing countries like ours. But they are increasingly being seen as a menance. My 4-part series intends to provide a solution, from which all the parties, the passengers, the government and the auto-wallahs, will find amiable.)

(All figures in Rs.)
Expected Revenues: 12*70*2 = 1680
Costs:
Gas: 300
Food during the day: 100
Loan/Depreciation/Maintainence: 200
Total Costs: 600
Profit: 1080
Table 1: The daily profit-and-loss statement of running an autorickshaw driver in Bangalore. Refer previous post.

Table 1 describes the economics of running an auto-rickshaw. What is wrong with this?

Everything.

Firstly, and least importantly, the auto-wallahs are not running through-out the 12-hour. A reasonable assumption would be 6 to 7 hours. This brings down the daily revenue to about Rs. 800-900. The profits tumble down 3-5 times, to about Rs. 200-300. That’s a monthly salary of Rs. 6000 - 10000. Imagine living in Bangalore and supporting a family of four with that. I am pretty sure that the government assumed this while fixing the fares. Recently, the auto-wallahs went on strike demanding that the fares they be allowed to charge. Their demands were met only partially.

~

I was coming back to college once, in an auto of course, ruminating over the conversation I had with the MD of Titan, Mr. Bhaskar Bhat. He was discussing how once the workers were demanding a high-payout for the voluntary retirement scheme, which was probably 3 to 4 times the industry norm. Without batting an eyelid, Bhat gave it to them.

On asking why he did so, “These workers’ aspirations have risen because they have worked with us. All this while we have been telling them that they are the best, motivating them to do their work. But now when they are made to leave, we are being stingy. Of course, the workers are doing to us, what we did to them. They want the best, because they were made to believe they were the best.”

~

Then, it struck me. Of course, these auto-wallahs should be disgruntled. Everywhere, people are allowed to charge whatever they want. No questions asked. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to charge whatever they want? They are made to live like a socialist relic, when everybody around them enjoys the fruits of capitalism, and this could not be brought out more starkly in any other city.

In effect they are rebelling against the system that have been forced upon them. Autos are not an essential service, buses are. Therefore, the government technically has no right to fix fares for them, though it has every right to regulate them in other aspects.

It is not about whether are charging too much or not: it is about whether they are being allowed to charge whatever they want while running a business.

The government’s line, I think, is that the public should not be made to pay so much.

That’s not true. I think the passengers get more miffed by the fact that auto-wallahs charge more than what they are “allowed” to charge, so in effect, they feel that they are being cheated. If the government says tomorrow that the fares are to be doubled, maybe there would be some quarters who would be angry about it, but the general public wouldn’t be so angry, because they feel the government has verified that this is a fair price. This has been proven in the recent strike. The government, even though they are the elected representatives, did not ask for a public opinion and none was offered. The fares were negotiated behind closed doors between the government and the union chiefs. The public accepted whatever price they were given.

(I am discounting other things that could happen if the fares are doubled: Citizen groups questioning the government on kickbacks, and the politician-policemen-autodriver nexus. Those are issues as well, and need to be looked at as well.)

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In a sense, I think the public does realise that the auto-wallahs are being cheated out of what is rightly theirs, but conveniently hide behind the pillar of morality when paying the fares.

Bangalore’s Auto-Rickshaw Drivers - Time to Reform?

Amongst all the nostalgic posts on my friends’ blogs, this might seem something out of the ordinary. I do miss my campus, and I am going to wallow in pits of nostalgia later on. Just like my batchmates. No doubt. But this is more important.

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Bangalore is a great city otherwise, of course the old-timers there would not care to agree, with their constant rants that the IT crowd has destroyed the great heritage the British brought along with it. But for a neo-classicist-turned-post-modernist, I find Bangalore fascinating. It’s just like Delhi, with a lot more culture imposed on it because of its cosmopolitan population. A couple of years ago, I would trumpet that “I like Delhi better than Bangalore”. Now coming home to Delhi from Bangalore, I am not so sure.

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One thing though stands out like a sore thumb in reinvented Bangalore. It’s auto-rickshaw drivers. (By the way, this post applies to most metros in India, most of all Chennai.) It is an important problem because a large proportion of the transport in Bangalore happens through autorickshaws. To put some figures on paper, there are approximately 60,000 - 65,000 autos in Bangalore: about 1% of Bangalore’s 8,000,000 population (that is including the Greater Bangalore areas) are auto-rickshawallahs.

That the “problem” is a product of the influx of the IT-wallahs, it is pretty evident. But they are a problem. A typical conversation that you would hear with an auto-rickshaw drivers would begin with you stating where you want to go. The auto-wallah would then tell you a price closer to double the metered rate and it’s not even nighttime. The conversation can take any of the following turns: 1.) You begin to walk away, and the auto-wallah drives off, leaving you there to find another auto. This is, by the way, against the rules: By law, if an empty auto is flagged down, the auto-wallah cannot refuse to take him. 2.) You begin to walk away, and the auto-wallah follows you reducing the price, till you two have a meeting point. 3.) You and the auto-wallah have a shouting match, and the more intimidating wins. 4.) Or you give in because you don’t have the time to waste on arguing over the fare.

That is not to say there aren’t any nice auto-drivers. There are some who are tremendously nice. But the vast majority of them are not averse to taking their passengers for a ride, clearly extorting them in the middle of the night, or even beating them up if they don’t comply. It has even happened to a couple of IIMB students, that too in front of our very own gates.

I think you are getting the picture now.

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Of course, we have a problem with them because they have a problem. I am sure money is not the problem with a lot of them. They have enough and more of it. There are a lot of them driving around with gold watches, gold chains, state-of-the-art stereo systems in their autos. A lot of them have money to spare. Why would they haggle over the prices? Why would they not go by the meter?

I even did a rudimentary costing for the auto-rickshaw driving business. On an average, the auto-driver has to fill up Rs. 300 worth of gas. He would require Rs. 100 for his food during the day, and another Rs. 200 towards the auto-rental, if he doesn’t own the vehicle, or towards the loan or depreciation and maintainence if he does. That’s a total of Rs. 600 everyday.

The revenue part of the business: A trip to MG Road, in the centre of the city, from my college typically costs Rs. 70. So to earn atleast Rs. 600, he needs to run 9 trips. Anything more than goes into his pockets. Each trip on an average takes half an hour, and an auto-rickshaw driver typically works 12 hours, including waiting time. If he was running for all 12 hours, he would earn Rs. 1680 by the meter. Therefore profits: Rs. 1000 per day! Multiply it by 30, you have a cool Rs. 30000 per month. What’s wrong with that?

Everything.

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Link of the day: India is not only the land of chess champions, but this year of carrom champions as well! Illavazhagi, from Chennai is now the World Carrom Champion.