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In 1984, I suddenly became uppish and bought a Bajaj Chetak scooter. This was a 'double promotion' for me...one generally escalated from pushbike to moped before jumping on a scooter which had what was called an awesome 'gear box'. Chetak had as many as 4 gears...no reverse gear though...that was for Bajaj Autos.
I read its Manual as thoroughly as I did that of my Prestige pressure cooker. The Chetak Manual was long on bytes but short on tricks.
For the first time I heard of 'cables' of which the blessed thing had plenty...brake cable (foot and hand), accelerator cable, clutch cable, and a couple of gear cables...I guess that's all.
I had to struggle why there were as many as two gear cables, the inner and the outer. Finally I figured it out...one for turning up and the other was turning down. And my eureka moment was when I realized that cables can pull but not push...I mean they can stretch but not compress...they were not as thick as rods.
I then recalled what we read in our second year Physics about the maximum height a round column (like a tree) can have without buckling under its own weight...it was not easy...it had zeroes of Bessel Functions.
Whenever I get to talk of Bessel Functions, I recall the light in the eyes of Prof GSS and everyone else in the ECE Dept in the 1960s...they used to tackle cylindrical waveguides (cables) and resonators (cavities) with relish.
1960s were truly an innocent time at IIT KGP. Since I was stuck in our Faculty Hostel for 7 long years, I could overhear the highbrow shop-talk of several engineering colleagues.
For ECEs it was Bessel (and for the fancier kids the Neumann) functions. For EEs it was Laplace Transforms. For MEs and CEs it was the Finite Element Method. For AEs (before they shot themselves up to Aerospace) it was Reynold's Number, wind tunnel, sub-, super-, hyper- and the fanciest trans-sonic flights...I mixed with a lot of them. AgEs avoided all shop-talk till one of them mastered (needlessly) Fortran II and its Do-Loop. Geophysicists talked of the awesome Panofsky & Phillips. Architecture guys and gals went on study tours of Hampi and Halebid and wowed us with their discoveries of the secrets of ancient temple-design.
By the time I retired in 2005, everyone at KGP lost their professional virginity. Chemists talked of Density Matrix instead of cis-trans isomerism. MEs talked of Dirac Equation for which they never had any use. ECEs talked of poles and contours and once in while of hypergeometric functions...some of them indulged in Group Theory as well.
It became an incestuous mess.
Anyway, I was talking of the sundry cables of the Chetak scooter. The Manual talked of everything except what to do when this or the other cable snapped on the road.
The second day I bought my Chetak, paying an exorbitant black-market price of Rs 13,500 since I didn't have a dollar-earning son, my Chetak broke down with a snapping sound a 100 yards from my Qrs C1-97 and I was grounded like a wild duck shot in flight.
Then came an Angel in the shape of what my wife used to call "Pipe-Biswas". This wizard was in our First Year Class a couple of decades back and was by then a professor in Metallurgy Dept (whose faculty used to talk reverentially of Powder Metallurgy in the 1960s). He stopped, seeing me stranded, and asked if he could be of any help. I pointed to my brand new machine and he inspected it and announced something like: "Clutch Cable snapped". And got under the Chetak and got up.
And he caught the handlebar of the scooter, pushed it hard, ran after it, and jumped on to it like on a runaway horse and asked me to get up...which I politely declined. He then reached the damn thing to my house and parked it and asked me to fetch Billoo at Harrys.
He also gave a lec-dem on what to do when the gear cable snaps, the brake cable snaps, the kick-starter gets stuck, and the horn keeps on hooting relentlessly...
I nodded my head knowingly like a coconut dangling and swaying in the breezy beaches of the Coromandel Coast...one has to put up a show of intelligence when one encounters an engineer.
I then fetched Billooo who dragged me home on his decaying excuse of a Vespa with his trademark hammer and a spanner and a new cable and grease, and rectified it in 5 minutes. And we both drove back on our scooters to his hut at Harrys...test drive.
And when I asked him how much should I pay, he smiled and said "Whatever you like!".
This was a gamble he always took with his new customers...I mean those with new Chetaks. I insisted and he persisted, and I was at a total loss...I didn't have a clue if a new clutch cable cost Rs 10 or 100. It was becoming like that game of paper, stone and scissors.
Billoo must have heard that I was a premium paymaster...a euphemism for a fool with his money....
************************************************************************************************************* I read its Manual as thoroughly as I did that of my Prestige pressure cooker. The Chetak Manual was long on bytes but short on tricks.
For the first time I heard of 'cables' of which the blessed thing had plenty...brake cable (foot and hand), accelerator cable, clutch cable, and a couple of gear cables...I guess that's all.
I had to struggle why there were as many as two gear cables, the inner and the outer. Finally I figured it out...one for turning up and the other was turning down. And my eureka moment was when I realized that cables can pull but not push...I mean they can stretch but not compress...they were not as thick as rods.
I then recalled what we read in our second year Physics about the maximum height a round column (like a tree) can have without buckling under its own weight...it was not easy...it had zeroes of Bessel Functions.
Whenever I get to talk of Bessel Functions, I recall the light in the eyes of Prof GSS and everyone else in the ECE Dept in the 1960s...they used to tackle cylindrical waveguides (cables) and resonators (cavities) with relish.
1960s were truly an innocent time at IIT KGP. Since I was stuck in our Faculty Hostel for 7 long years, I could overhear the highbrow shop-talk of several engineering colleagues.
For ECEs it was Bessel (and for the fancier kids the Neumann) functions. For EEs it was Laplace Transforms. For MEs and CEs it was the Finite Element Method. For AEs (before they shot themselves up to Aerospace) it was Reynold's Number, wind tunnel, sub-, super-, hyper- and the fanciest trans-sonic flights...I mixed with a lot of them. AgEs avoided all shop-talk till one of them mastered (needlessly) Fortran II and its Do-Loop. Geophysicists talked of the awesome Panofsky & Phillips. Architecture guys and gals went on study tours of Hampi and Halebid and wowed us with their discoveries of the secrets of ancient temple-design.
By the time I retired in 2005, everyone at KGP lost their professional virginity. Chemists talked of Density Matrix instead of cis-trans isomerism. MEs talked of Dirac Equation for which they never had any use. ECEs talked of poles and contours and once in while of hypergeometric functions...some of them indulged in Group Theory as well.
It became an incestuous mess.
Anyway, I was talking of the sundry cables of the Chetak scooter. The Manual talked of everything except what to do when this or the other cable snapped on the road.
The second day I bought my Chetak, paying an exorbitant black-market price of Rs 13,500 since I didn't have a dollar-earning son, my Chetak broke down with a snapping sound a 100 yards from my Qrs C1-97 and I was grounded like a wild duck shot in flight.
Then came an Angel in the shape of what my wife used to call "Pipe-Biswas". This wizard was in our First Year Class a couple of decades back and was by then a professor in Metallurgy Dept (whose faculty used to talk reverentially of Powder Metallurgy in the 1960s). He stopped, seeing me stranded, and asked if he could be of any help. I pointed to my brand new machine and he inspected it and announced something like: "Clutch Cable snapped". And got under the Chetak and got up.
And he caught the handlebar of the scooter, pushed it hard, ran after it, and jumped on to it like on a runaway horse and asked me to get up...which I politely declined. He then reached the damn thing to my house and parked it and asked me to fetch Billoo at Harrys.
He also gave a lec-dem on what to do when the gear cable snaps, the brake cable snaps, the kick-starter gets stuck, and the horn keeps on hooting relentlessly...
I nodded my head knowingly like a coconut dangling and swaying in the breezy beaches of the Coromandel Coast...one has to put up a show of intelligence when one encounters an engineer.
I then fetched Billooo who dragged me home on his decaying excuse of a Vespa with his trademark hammer and a spanner and a new cable and grease, and rectified it in 5 minutes. And we both drove back on our scooters to his hut at Harrys...test drive.
And when I asked him how much should I pay, he smiled and said "Whatever you like!".
This was a gamble he always took with his new customers...I mean those with new Chetaks. I insisted and he persisted, and I was at a total loss...I didn't have a clue if a new clutch cable cost Rs 10 or 100. It was becoming like that game of paper, stone and scissors.
Billoo must have heard that I was a premium paymaster...a euphemism for a fool with his money....
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