Ramble On

(The following story is a full reproduction of one of Jackson’s stories. It hasn’t made it all the way through the editorial process yet…)

Chapter 1

My parents and I were on a hike in the forest, when all of a sudden a beast unknown to science came out and ate my parents, and then came for me! I ran through the forest as fast as I could, but then, out of the forest, came another beast and fought the beast. I barely escaped. But I had never seen this part of the forest. I was lost!

I finally found a cave. That night I made a fire and went to sleep in the heat. The next morning I awoke to see a very big foot outside the cave. When it left I looked at the footprint and knew right away. IT WAS A TYRANNOSAURUS REX!! At that I knew I was in danger and needed to get out of the forest. That night I searched for the end of the forest. I found out that night is not the safest time. There is lots of nocturnal animals. Speaking of which lots of dayurnal also. Such as for nocturnal, velociraptor, and dilophosaurus. And as for dayurnal, well there is tyrannosaurus rex and carnataurus, and much more. I found the cave again and built another fire and went to sleep.

I awoke and was surrounded by a pack of velociraptors. I knew what they want, their eggs. In what position they were in. But I didn’t have them! I picked up a rock and through at them. And another, and another, and did not until they ran off. What I did I knew was very dangourous. But that taught me a lesson, I NEEDED WEAPONS! So I went into the forest and made a bow and some arrows.

Chapter 2

I thought I had seen everything, but I didn’t! I was walking through the forest on the third day, and an arrow hit a tree right in front of me. I looked where it had come from and saw a cave man. And another, and another. There were

Chapter 3

too many. I got out my bow and shot at them. I killed a few, but soon I ran out of arrows, and threw a few rocks and knocked out one, but there were still too many! I ran and barely escaped! The same pack of velociraptors that I ran off atacked the cavemen. But luckily they didn’t see me. And I found the cave again. I curled up and took a nap. But a deafending roar awoke me an hour later. I went out to see what it was, still dazed. I found out that it was a Spinosaurus defending her offspring from a Tyranosaurus Rex.

Chapter 4

I didn’t want to leave the offspring to die, because they tyranosaurus rex was as I thought breaking her neck. I took the offspring into the cave, and fed them an animal I hunted. Then went out and made some more arrows and an ax, plus a spear. I cut down some trees and then I built a hammer out of wood and stone and I built a hut. I built a fence and put the five spinosauruses in it, and named them Spino, Rex, Claw, Spike, Spot. Then I went out and hunted some animals. And I was very lucky. I brought home ten carcases, and one of them was a Tyranosaurus rex. And I took it’s one offspring and named it Tyran.

Chapter 5

For the next couple of days I worked on training them. Especially Tyran. For I was hoping I could ride him and hunt with him, and maybe have some fun with the cavemen. I was about to go hunt to feed my six when I heard a noise right outside my hut. I opened the door and found a young stegasaurus. I named him stego, and put him with the rest and fed him some leaves. After I came back I fed and began digging in their pen. Once I was done, I made a bucket. I found a pond and filled the bucket with water. And when two days were over I had finished building a pond for them to drink out of. I caught some fish and put them in there. Then I planted some trees and bushes in their pin. Then I trained them some more.

Chapter 6

Tyran is now an adult. It only takes a month for them to grow up. I also can now ride him. So I went hunting with him for the first time. And we found some cavemen, we chased them until it got boring, then Tyran ate them. We caught a King’s feast. But Tyran didn’t eat, he was too full!

Chapter 7

I let the rest go. But I kept Tyran, he was too helpful to let go.

Chapter 8

I decided to try and find the path. I hopped on Tyran, and to my luck after an hour, I found the path. I let Tyran go. I went down the path and found the road, and went down it. Then went to my grandparents.

My son is very ambitious. He wants to create a zoo with a mix of both extinct and extant species. Realistically, the only hurdle in his way is managing the time travel. He has some preliminary plans, and has asked me for help fleshing them out, but I admit that the mechanics are beyond me (I can’t even fix the catalytic hydrometer in my car when the motor flywheel valve gets clogged up).

So I’m asking for your help. Below are Jackson’s plans so far, with a mix of ideas and questions and some of his detailed sketches. I ask you, in the interests of professional respect, to treat these plans as appropriately patented, and not use them for your own financial benefit. But any help you can give us would be appreciated:

My Idea of a time machine is doubtful, but I’m still going to try.

I will need to get a wormhole from outerspace. I need to know physics and machanichs. I will bring back Tyranosaurus-Rex, dilaphosaurus, diplodicos, apatasaurus, ultrasaurus, velocirapter, and much more. I need lots of help. The Idea of the name of the zoo is “Jackson’s Dinos.” I will also try to have modern animals. I will have a plant house where prehistoric and modern plants will be on display. Under the zoo there will be a aquarium as big as the zoo and way deep. It will hold blue whales.

If the time machine does not work then I will do DNA. Three things block me in the time machine, getting wormhole and shrinking it, I don’t know if I’ll be able to get back, and I can’t reach the speed of light. I will have to grow a lot of plankton.

Another Idea of mine is a vase that half a corner high their will be a seal that has a hole in it. Dirt will go under the seal. You will plant in the vase. If I am succsessful on bringing back dinosaurs I will give some to the army to train.

Here’s a few questions: will we die out just like the dinosaurs? Will I be succsessful? Where will my zoo be? How old would humans live if there was no poulootion?

Another idea is make an animal that is both female and male like a plant. This is a picture of DNA. I will make a male and female together by putting in DNA from both of them. I wonder if I can munpulate energy and make it last forever. Another question. How to munpulate it? Here’s another Idea: Make a human lifespan much longer, to 800 years. Question: what will happen when undersea volcanoes destroy the seas? I wonder if I can make a animal that can do all the things the other animals can. What is a spider web made out of? How bout a flower that spits venom? I wonder if I can make paper without a tree. Maybe something that makes oxegen underwater.

As part of their training program for lateral hires, ThoughtWorks ships new employees off to India for what they call Immersion. As somebody who had never been out of the country, other than a terrifying three-hour haggling session my grandmother dragged me into in Juarez, I was quite excited to see what this whole traveling thing was all about. What follows is my account of those two weeks. Before you get too far, though, I feel I ought to warn you that it’s a bit long with traces of scatalogical humor, so if you suffer from either ADD or excessive maturity you should probably just scroll for the pictures and skip the text.

When I discovered that I’d be going to India, I looked up what vaccinations I’d need from the CDC website. The one piece of advice I remember reading about for those interested in survival was about staying away from the water (unless it’s bottled). When I had my doctor’s consultation before getting my vaccinations, he too warned me about he water, which was not cleaned properly and often had mosquito larvae in it. He told me to stay away from fruit and salads as well, since they were likely cleaned with contaminated water. My excitement for travel took a hit that day, and I spent the night dreaming about larvae-infested water being sprayed over a garden of fruit.

Getting to India proved to be problematic. Our plane arrived late in Frankfurt, forcing us to spend the night before flying to Mumbai. The little bit I saw of Germany certainly wasn’t the exotic adventure I was hoping for. Really the only substantial difference I saw between Germany and the US was that Germany appears to have a higher proportion of English speakers. Besides, Americans are already well-acquainted with Germans—they’re the original bad guys Bruce Willis had to kill 15 Die Hards ago. The only thing I knew about Indians was that they’re the people who answer our customer service calls with the thick accents, and the ones getting blamed for stealing our jobs. And there’s something about Kashmir, but I didn’t really know anything about it other than the fact that it was named after a Led Zeppelin song.

48 hours after leaving Chicago, we finally arrived in Mumbai and were driven to Pune. The people had a different skin color. They used a different alphabet on many of the signs. They drove on the wrong side of the road. Here, at last, was a proper foreign country.

When you stop and think about it, driving on the left makes sense in a way, because the cars coming at you are driving on the right. Some of the other Indian theories of driving are harder to understand, though. For starters, Indians lack agreement on what a comfortable range of velocities is on any given road. The drive from Mumbai to Pune occurred in the middle of the night with low traffic. We were driving along a major highway, and suddenly we hit one of those slowdowns that in the US would be immediately interpreted as either a wreck or construction. It turned out that it was just a pocket of vehicles driving at a leisurely 15 kilometers an hour, which is a full 100 km/h (~60 mph) less than than our previous cruising velocity. We hit several such pockets on the way.

Also noticeable on the drive was the fact that those little white strips in the middle of the road, most commonly interpreted as lane dividers in the US, are really just decorations in India. In fact, it appears to be a point of pride to straddle the lane dividers where possible. And multiple vehicles routinely fit side-by-side in one lane, sometimes with as little as an inch or two in between.

But the facet of Indian driving that took the most getting used to was their fondness for the horn. Indians prefer a multi-sensory approach to figuring out what’s behind them and have found the horn to be a most useful replacement for rear-view mirrors. As far as I can tell, honking seems to be a rather nice way of telling the car in front of you to move over so they don’t cause a wreck by giving you no option but to run into them. It’s a bit like saying “Pardon me, would you mind moving the fuck out of the way please?” The truckers actually have bumper stickers, such as “Horn OK Please”, reminding you to be friendly and honk so they don’t have to bother using their mirrors. It’s quite telling that the bumper stickers were in English and not Hindi or one of the many local languages—native Indians need no such reminder. In fact, Indians have fallen so in love with the horn that they even honk when it’s quite plain that 1) you see them, and 2) you have absolutely no room to move over.

At nighttime, flashing your brights is an acceptable substitute for honking. However, since the whole point is to get the driver in front of you to know that you’re behind them without having them check their rear-view mirror, it takes several flashes to get their attention. Our driver would start strobe-lighting the truckers from about 80 yards away, and when he got close, he honked a couple times just for good measure before passing.

Indians have all sorts of ways they categorize themselves. State classifications are common, Punjabi or Mahastran, which makes a lot of sense because Indian culture, dress, food, and language varies considerably from region to region (India is a single nation only because the British once thought it should be, and because at a critical moment in their history they had probably the single best politician of all times in Mohandas Ghandi). The waning caste system still provides a common source of categorization—you might, for example, see a marriage ad in the classifieds for a twenty-five year old Brahmin. And all the restaurants are labeled as veg or non-veg.

But the categorization most useful to the traveling American is what kind of honker an Indian is. There’s style—the single blip, the double toot, the long drawn out single honk. Then there’s the all-important sound quality, which some Indians obviously put a lot of pride in. At one end of the spectrum lies the impotent whine of the rickshaws. At the other end lie the complex melodies played when the driver presses the horn (many Indians have wired up similar melodies to the reverse gear). Along the way you run into all sorts of eccentricities, such as the huge dump truck with the quick pipsqueak honk, which seemed to me along the lines of giving the nickname “Tiny” to Shaquille O’Neal. The result, during busy traffic, is a dizzyingly annoying cacophony of honks, melodies, toots, whines, squeaks, and combinations thereof (the squeaky melody is particularly annoying, especially when the driver feels compelled to carry the tune to completion).

Amazingly, Indians don’t seem to get mad when they get honked at or cut off (and the Indian definition of being cut off is far more extreme than anything Americans are used to). I asked one of them about that once, and in typical Socratic fashion, he asked me how often I could possibly get mad in a single day.

The whole situation is exacerbated by the nearly complete lack of any traffic signals or stop signs in parts of India (and much of Pune).

To turn right, for example, (equivalent to turning left in the US), you just creep forward until the oncoming traffic has to take a momentary rest from using the horn to lightly tap the brakes, and then you bolt forward. Assertiveness is the only necessity of a good Indian driver. And yet, amazingly, the traffic ebbs and flows rhythmically all on its own, with no intervention of rules or help from traffic signals. Once a set of vehicles force north-south traffic to stop temporarily, that provides all the time needed for the backlog of east-west traffic to dominate for the next minute or so, before the cycle repeats itself. It’s not that the Indians going north-south are exercising their sense of fairness and giving those east-west guys a chance. It’s just that it takes them that long to regain control of the road.

I don’t think it scales well, though. The traffic I saw coming back to Mumbai, which was during the evening, was horrendous, and Mumbai has a few more traffic lights than Pune. Some of my Indian friends are from Bangalore, and they told me that it’s not unusual to sit completely still for 20 minutes or more.

Arrival

The first day in India was a nightmare. I was the only foreigner in my bungalow for much of the day, and I desperately wanted to talk to my wife. My cell phone wouldn’t work, I had no other phone to use, and there was no internet. We received some printouts from the ThoughtWorks office reminding us to be careful with the water. However, I had no bottled water, and eyed the pitcher of water the caretakers had brought to my room suspiciously. In my mind’s eye, I saw little maggots swimming around, begging me to give in to my thirst.

I was quite tired, having been up the entire plane ride from Frankfurt and trying to stay awake to adjust to the time zone change (it was just daybreak when we arrived at the bungalow). I went downstairs after a bit to find the bungalow’s caretaker sleeping on blankets laid across the marble floor. Embarrassed, I went back upstairs to my room and just waited. I’d never felt so completely lonely as I did that morning.

At what I assume to be around 8:30, the cleaner came up and said “breakfus,” which after a bit I translated to “We are about to start cooking breakfast, and would like you to come downstairs now.” I came down and read the first page of the Pune Times (written in English) while I waited. The sidebar apologized for not being able to deliver the paper the previous day, and blamed the competition for bribing the right people to prevent delivery.

Several minutes later, my caretaker brought out a blank plate and a plate full of various fruits, saying “sit, sir.” I did so, hoping I would not be the only one eating at the large dining table, and wondering what excuse I could give to avoid eating the disease-infested fruit in front of me. Luckily, he brought me out a plate with two eggs, and another plate with toast, a butter dish, and a coffee dish. I gratefully chowed down, After a few seconds of internal debate, I decided that maggots can’t survive at coffee-like temperatures, and downed the coffee, glad for the caffeine injection. The caretaker and cleaner stayed invisible in the kitchen, occasionally peering around the corner to see if I needed anything. All I had to do was make eye contact and they would bring out more toast.

After eating by myself, I started picking up the dishes to carry to the kitchen, hoping to at least help clean up and build some rapport with someone. As soon as the caretaker saw me, he kept saying “oh no sir” and grabbed the dishes out of my hand. He and the cleaner picked up as I watched helplessly, unable to communicate to either of them. It was at that moment when I realized how depressed I was.

I went for a walk, which didn’t help my spirits any. India is dirty. It smells dirty, as the pollution and dust combine to create a distinctive odor. Trash is omnipresent. The little side shops that lined the street were tiny and dilapidated. Homeless people, beggars, and stray dogs were everywhere. I did however find a grocery store with bottled water called Oxyrich. The label displayed a smiling woman bragging about their patented process of using 300% the amount of oxygen, which I guess actually made it H₂O₃, but fortunately it still tasted like water.

India is a third-world country trying to join the first world. The walk to our office, for example, was down a road of trash and street vendors. And then you get to the tech park at Yerawada, with a huge glass building housing IBM, Schlumberger, and ThoughtWorks. While I was there, someone managed to convince Jnan Dash, one of the inventors of DB2, to give us a talk. It was a fortunate event—Dash is a fascinating man and a very gifted speaker. An Indian himself, he noted how several people had noted the growth in India and had started calling Bangalore the Silicon Valley of India.

And then he showed us a 30-mile aerial view of Silicon Valley, where he lives. On the map were labels of all the tech giants, packed together like sardines. Show me the Indian Google, he said, and then we can talk about the Indian Silicon Valley. The world is getting flatter, but it’s not flat yet.

Indian Life

Crossing the street on foot in India is a bit like playing Frogger, only if you back up, you get squished. I read the paper one morning about a man who got hit in a auto accident, causing a compound fracture in his leg. Nobody stopped for 15 minutes to help him before a rickshaw driver finally drove him to the hospital. When I asked one of my Indian friends about the situation, he said that is was fairly common for something like that to happen. The problem is that, if you stop, there’s a good chance that the police will blame you for the accident. Even if they don’t, they will definitely tie up a bunch of your time and therefore most people keep driving hoping someone else will stop.

Corruption is rampant in India. One of my Indian friends summed it up nicely “If you’re in India and care about being honest, you’re the first person who will be fucked.” Running a red light is a simple example (not that there are many lights in India to run). You can pay the cop off for maybe 300 rupees (less than $10). Or the cop can send you to the police station, who will send you to the sub-inspector, who will send you to the court, who will send you back to the police officer for more documentation. That will police officer will then refuse to do anything until you pay him 1000 rupees.

The closest analogy America has to the way Indian police work is the mafia. It’s not quite that dramatic; I haven’t heard of anyone waking up next to the head of their favorite racing horse, for example. But they operate with the same mindset—everything in their area belongs to them. So all the little vendors set up on the side of the road have to pay the police, and the police are known to take what they want without paying. People sleeping on the side of the road have to pay. Even the beggars have to pay.

According to my friends, begging is an industry in India, supported by the same infrastructure that prostitution is in the US. A pimp manages all begging in an area. The beggars pay the pimp; the pimp pays the police. My friends tell me that it’s even common for the pimps to “rent” small kids to a begging woman to improve her productivity.

The more I learned about India, and the more I came to know my Indian friends at ThoughtWorks, the more comfortable I became. We’d go out most evenings for dinner and drinks, or shopping, and being around friends with a sense of humor made all the difference in the world. They’d tell the rickshaw drivers where to go, they’d haggle ruthlessly to bring the rickshaw price down 10 rupees (about a US quarter, but they were very concerned about the rickshaw drivers trying to take advantage of us foreigners), and they’d tell us what the different foods were made of (it turns out they’re all made of curry).

And, in spite of not speaking much English, the bungalow caretaker was very nice to me. Every time I’d leave the bungalow, he would lock the door behind me, and every time I needed back in, I’d ring the doorbell and he would open it, saying “thank you sir” with a smile on his face. He was always up before 8 to cook us breakfast, and would smile graciously as he opened the door for us when we’d come home drunk after midnight.

The cleaner was equally meticulous. I got in the habit of looking around each day after work to see what else he managed to clean up.

Not only did he make the bed, he neatly folded my shirt that I had draped over my luggage. He folded my jacket in a very neat square that I would not previously have believed possible. He had even arranged my coins, which I had simply dumped on the nightstand, such that all the dimes were placed in a single pile on top of the quarter, and right next to it the single Indian 5 rupee coin was placed. When I went into the bathroom, where I had left the phone charger plugged in for the phone ThoughtWorks provided me, I laughed out loud when I saw how he had neatly wrapped the cord around itself, as if coiling up a cord of twine.

One of the more interesting sights I saw that first week in India was the Indian toilet.

They have plenty of Western toilets, which is what we had in the bungalows, but many of the public restrooms were all Indian. The Indian toilet has no seat, and looks a bit like a latrine gilded in ceramic. You won’t find any toilet paper in the Indian toilet stalls.

Naturally, I brought up the topic of proper ass-wiping technique with my Indian friends. Apparently, you squat over the toilets in a sort of catcher position until you’ve emptied your stomach. These toilets have a small tap next to them with a small jug (called a “mug”) that you fill with water and pour over your ass, cleaning with your left hand (unless you’re left-handed, of course). When you are done, you wash your hands.

The moral of the story, as far as I can tell, is that you should never shake hands with a left-handed Indian.

English is common enough in India that many of the newspapers are written in English, the signs are often in English, and the shop names as well. But it’s a kind-of hybrid English, with many mispellings and Indian words thrown in. A sign noted that anyone caught littering will be femed. A television commercial told us that life eej hard. The newspapers would talk about crowds of five lakh people.

But all of my Indian friends spoke English well. And thankfully, they were all right-handed.

Saturday morning we had arranged to go site-seeing in Mahabelshwar, famous for its beautiful vistas and strawberry farms. Grudgingly, we all got up early to meet the bus that was supposed to be there at 6:30, but it was over an hour late. The bus driver spent the rest of the day making that hour up.

Going up the mountain was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. There was a small wall on the cliff side that probably came halfway up the tires on our bus, and if anyone went over the cliff, there would be nothing stopping you for a long way. I probably wouldn’t have paid any attention to the wall except for the fact that the bus driver would have made Nascar drivers nervous. Going 200 miles per hour in a race car, with world-class safety harnesses and medical attention seconds away, is one thing. Going 50+ miles per hour in an 18-person capacity bus, up a two-lane cliff road, inches away from the cars and motorcycles and a long way down, is quite another.

I spent most of the trip up the mountain desperately coming up with a contingency plan.

I was on the right side of the bus, but one person removed from the window. I didn’t think that exit would work anyhow, since it would be the first side tumbling down the cliff. I gave furtive glances to the left side, wondering, if I was just quick enough, whether I might be able to Superman-dive out one of those windows before any of my colleagues on the left, or the downward velocity of the bus, blocked my passage. Despite my willingness to suffer some serious scrapes and bruises, my chances didn’t look good.

The bus driver was this confident young Indian wearing a white sweater and a green scarf, the kind of person Americans would call metrosexual. His right hand, which darted between the steering wheel and the horn with frightening rapidity, looked quite normal. His left hand, which alternated between the steering wheel and the gearshift, displayed fingernails painted red, and a fake thumbnail that extended half an inch above his thumb. He drove the bus like it was a motorcycle as he honked and sped and whizzed past every vehicle on that road. Both lanes were his, and he treated any vehicle in front of him as a affront to his supremacy. There were several occasions when I knew that there was absolutely no chance he would avoid hitting the vehicle (or pedestrian!) whose lane he was jumping back into.

Thankfully, his depth perception was far superior to my own. The upper regions mainly consisted of a road barely one lane wide with traffic coming both directions. The road width wasn’t often a problem because most Indians can’t afford cars and drive motorcycles (my record was seeing a family of five riding on one motorcycle, and seeing a family of four on one is fairly common). But our driver was fearless. As soon as one car passed us going the other way, he would slide over into oncoming traffic and speed up enough to dare oncoming vehicles to hesitate. Occasionally, he would have to slam on his brakes and jump back into our side of the road, by some miracle managing not to hit the motorcyclist who had claimed our spot. At other times, he would seize the opportunity by flooring it. The windows would screech with the sound of the limbs scraping against them, and, just in time, we would be back in our lane.

He navigated the streets like he owned them. And when the police would signal him to pull over so they could collect the “tax,” he would grunt mightily and wave his hand dismissively, never actually acknowledging that he’d seen the police. If the police did manage to make direct eye contact (the one thing you try to avoid), we would pull over to the side of the road and give them their due cash, just as you would crossing the bridge owned by the troll.

At one point we made a wrong turn. Our driver applied his brakes, gave the people behind him but a second to digest what was about to happen, and then reversed into some space on the side of the road that I could have sworn didn’t exist two seconds earlier. With horns on both sides gently suggesting that we get the fuck out of the way, he pulled off the three-point turn on a one-lane road in an 18-man bus. There would be several times during the journey where all of us would leave our jaws hanging at his mad bus driving skills.

Some of the other buses had people getting out and walking the road, trying to prepare the way on foot. Incompetent fools. Our driver needed no help. At one point, where the path was too narrow to allow two vehicles side by side, two cars both vied for the spot at the same time. The result was one of the more amusing things I saw in India—both drivers, temporarily unable to comprehend why their horns were having no effect on the car in front of them. Our driver would never have gotten in such a predicament.

On the way home, we stopped at a petrol station because the bus driver’s fearlessness had scared the shit out of all of us so much that one of us foreigners was desperate enough to brave the Indian toilet. Several of our party stepped out for a smoke. A man riding a bicycle right next to them got run over by a rickshaw. While his bike was OK, the man was clearly scraped and bruised. The rick driver drove up to a pump, stepped out as if nothing happened, and started filling up his tank. The cyclist gave the rick driver a brief dirty look – one of the few I saw in India – and started walking his bike the other direction.

This is India. Life eej hard.