THE WONDERFUL REAR ENGINED DIESEL AUTO

 I am probably not wrong in assuming that the design of The Rear Engine Diesel Auto is developed in India.  It is no Lamborghini. It stands in the front row to win the prize for being the most unwieldy, uncomfortable, unsightly, dangerous and noisy passenger vehicle in the world.  I f I introduced this beast to you all as a textile mill with three wheels, you would easily believe me.

If you have week knees and you have just got down at the railway station with 15 kilos of luggage, it is simpler for you to walk a few kilometres to home rather than try to get in one of these monstrosities.  You could politely ask the driver to get you a six inch high step to climb onto before you step on the floor of the auto but the chances of getting it are bleak.  They don’t  have a six inch step or any other step.

When you sit on the passenger seat and it has not started, you get a good commanding view of the surroundings. Then the driver disappears towards the rear of the auto and starts it with a rope.  The drivers need fairly good back muscles to start the auto because they bend and tie a piece of rope on a shiny wheel and then pull with all their might as if trying to pull out a fat carrot from the soil by grabbing its top.  This `rope trick’  wakes up the giant from its sleep and it goes  `THUK’ one time and then another time after a second  and then   many  quick THUK THUK s in a row, until the driver comes out of his hiding from behind the auto and takes the controls. He puts his hand on the accelerator and hell breaks loose, THAKKAAD, Thukk, chick thakkad THUK DUK Thakkadd, Thuk chick chchick, tuk  tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk THAKKAD, THUK THUK  Dhik DHIK Dhik Thakkadd .

The only thing that separates your own batootie from this desperate sounding machine is a thin piece of foam on a thin piece of ply wood or metal. It is inadequate to say the least.  The vibration and sound permeates to all parts of your being, you cant hear any thing else, you are shaking uncontrollably, you smell something burning under you and wonder if it is the seat of your pants, the seat also gets heated . You also cannot see any thing clearly because you including eyes are shaking, every thing is a blur.

Finally it starts to move, Please read the Thakkad thuk chick, thakkad thuck chchick three times faster and three times louder to get the effect right,  The feeling is the direct opposite of `simply heaven’  as described in a suiting’s advert.   Also the suspension of the bloody gizmo comes into action.  It seems they replaced the shock absorbers with two pieces of Bamboo of equal length and diameter.  The combined effect of the shock giving capacity of the auto and the unexpected-ness  and size of  Dehradun potholes can shift somebody,s  vertebrae inches away from their original position. To aid this readjustment of the spine comes the back rest which is a piece of wood, all of ten inches wide
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The seat is inspired by the old Hyderabad Pedal rickshaw. The seat of this auto was designed for midgets, if you are medium height and place your bum on the seat and your feet in the space in front , then your thighs will be up in the air because the seat is 12 inches higher  than the place where you put your feet, you can  semi squat or you can sit in a semi crossed leg position so that the sides of your shoes are resting below and there is no grip, you hold on to an assortment of pipes on which the canvas on top is strung to prevent yourself from falling off.

I got into one on a cold winter morning coming back from the railway station so I also experienced its wonderful device for preventing the draught from hitting the body .  There were two large rolled up curtains which came down on both open sides of the auto. These things were tied up somewhere near the floor with a long loose string. The draught was channelized onto my face rather than getting stopped. The whole curtain also kept  flying off totally and exposing me completely, it made a large sound,   a PHACHACK  SWISH  PHACHACK SWISH  when it came back after flying for a minute,  I was  powerless to stop it because I was hanging on for my spinal chord and  my life with my frozen hands, once or twice this huge dusty curtain hit me hard physically on my leg.  I wasn’t even able to prevent my luggage from shifting from left to right and polishing the dirty metal floor clean because i had no spare hands or legs.

It didn’t have to brake much because there wasn’t much traffic in the early morning but it all had to end and it had to stop when it reached my house, a loud screech emanated from under the auto but nothing else happened.   I thought he was going to overshoot my house, then the  screech grew louder and louder,  enough to wake the neighbours and then it stopped suddenly. So suddenly that I and my baggage got lifted from our awkward positions  and got plastered on the back of the auto driver and the cold metal pipes supporting his  seat.

Fortunately I got away with a mild backache, a head cold and a minor dacoity. No limbs were lost and vertebrae have more or less held, but  that is only because I eat my vitamins on time.  

I am going to do two things. One  I am going to strongly recommend that you first look at the auto before you agree to  get into one, reject the one described above.  India  still produces low floor, quiet  and comfortable autos. Secondly i am going to file a public interest litigation against those who allowed these horrors to come onto the road.  Join the petition.

Param Jigyasu

 

You can write to me at paramjigyasu7@gmail.com