23 Dec 1998

Hi all,

Sorry about the silence. The list of emails to be replied to is ever growing longer and I just have not been able to sit down and do the
needful. I thought I would be free after Dec 19, when the kids left for
their Christmas break, but the past four days have been busier than
ever. But now things promise to ease up a bit, at least for a couple of
days, so I will write individually during the weekend. It is funny how
four of us were sitting at lunch today and we found out we were given
the night off to do whatever we wanted – we discussed and planned the
evening for a long time,w hene we suddenly realized we were making a big deal out of just a single evening. It was then that it hit us that a day
off, or even just an evening, is such a luxury in this mad paced world
we are currently living in. Another thought struck me when I was given
400Kr as a Christmas gift by the school, to buy whatever I wanted. And I
just could not think of one thing I would buy. In the last four months I
have bought absolutely nothing besides the bare necessities and the
occasional chocolate bar (yeah, I got to stop eating those things). I
have gotten so used to living on what I have, I do not know what to do
when I am given some extra money. Oh well, this is not quite what I
wanted to write about in this email. Actually I just composed this long
mail and the damn computer just jumped cables on me. So I have to
rewrite this whole thing.

Learning to drive has been quite an experience. It started three weeks
ago, with theory classes on the internals of a bus – all in Danish of
course. It was bad enough that I knew very little Danish, and learning
how air and hydraulic brakes work was not fun at all. So I spent a good
part of two weeks, 10-12 hours a day, translating 40 pages of this
Danish manual, word for word. Well, the effort paid off when I finally
got 99 out of 100 questions right in the final exam. It was so amusing
to see my instuctor’s face when the results were announced – he did not believe I would pass, let alone top the class of three students! Felt
good to stick a finger in his face and prove him wrong. 😉

Everyone told me the written part is the toughest half and I more than
readily believed it, considering how much effort I had put into this
single exam. But boy, was I in for a surpise. The first time I sat in
the bus, I was given a key and just asked to drive. I did not have a
clue what the various switches and lights on the control panel were for,
or even how to start a bus. The first thing I was asked to do was
reverse around a corner up hill. Talk of jumping in the deep end. So it
took me five nerve-racking minutes of jumping and jerking to back up
fifteen stupid metres. You see, the brakes on a bus are very powerful
(no wonder we studied them so much in theory), so you cannot just jam
down on them – the bus will come to an agonizingly screeching halt,
which feels like the chassis is being torn apart . First lesson of the
day. Soon I found myself driving through the centre of this tiny Danish
town, with curving cobbled streets, filled with pedestrians who just had
to make my day worse by stepping onto the road without warning. The
thing about the gear system in a bus, is that the clutch and the gears
are so far away, it takes a while to transmit the change. So you really
have to wait for that extra fraction of a second in neutral before
shifting to a new gear. Else the gear box protests. Loudly and fiercely.
Also, in a small car, it is sometimes useful (like in icy conditions) to
slow down the vehicle by shifting down gears rather than using the
brakes. But you can’t do that with a bus. The speed of the vehicle has
to match the gear, else the gears won’t mesh. Second lesson. So, the day went by, one lesson after another, on the highway, in the towns, and
before I knew it I had driven for two hours and 100 kms around Denmark.

All along, this instructor of mine was just sitting beside me, snorting,
deriding and laughing at my total incompetence. Man, the guy had some guts to risk his life along with a total novice like me. But I soon
realized, it takes much to damage a bus, and perhaps his bravado was
understandable.

The good thing about being awful at something is that there is really
only way to go – up. So my learning curve was steep but I found I was
improving like mad. On the second day, except for a smashed right mirror and a street lamp that was bent at right angles, I did just fine. On the third day, I had a “slippery course”, with ice, water and the works – it
was a funny feeling to have this huge 18 ton bus hurtling totally out of
your control. But it was the day that gave me the most confidence. On
the fourth day, I began to find myself relaxing and suddenly I had more
time to do all the manouvres that I had just been struggling with a
couple of days earlier. And fianlly, today, I had the test, and surprise, surpirse, I passed it. So I am now qualified to drive a bus. I am so exhausted from having driven about 12 hours a day for the last four days. I guess there will be more of that on the way down to India
in a couple of weeks – we still have not decided what to do about this
Iraq situation, esp. since we have a number of Americans and Brits on
the team. Need to figure that one out when everyone returns to Denmark in the first week of Jan.

Okay, I will sign off here. As I promised, I will write more over the
weekend. Hope all of you are well. Do write when you can. Happy holidays and all that.

Take care,
Arvind