RTA never knew

All the aspirants giving a driving test in the UAE will have one to three stories to share (on an average) about their triumph - Its one of the most popular ice breaking topics between strangers meeting in the emirates. I really don’t want to narrate my sorry story here. My graduation from the transport authority was only after the 6th successful failure, spanning exactly one year from my first failed test. The waiting period for the forthcoming test is the most excruciating affair - rest all was a typical cycle - pay-fail-blame RTA(Roads and Transport Authority)!!!

Why would I blame RTA?? Well, I will share some interesting driving lessons I had undertaken in rural Andhra Pradesh - in a village called Ulavapadu. Ulavapadu is a coastal village in Ongole district, which falls in the Chennai-Hyderabad route. That was my first civil engineering job, with Simplex Concrete Piles (I) Ltd. I had a life changing exposure to a myriad of people & cultures during my short time in Simplex!

I and Bini had joined Simplex in August of 2002 and our project comprised construction of some 72 kilometer roads/bridges, as part of the prestigious Prime Ministers Golden Quadrilateral initiative, connecting the four metros of India.

That was the time of the year, when tropical cyclones attacked occasionally in the coastal areas where our road project was being executed. Within the first couple of weeks, I was notorious for bringing ill luck to the two new sites I was initially assigned to - both sites were temporarily closed due to rain and flooding. The highly superstitious elder men looked upon me as a harbinger of doom. The third site had an even dreadful fate! Heard they discovered the foundation pcc after the floods in an archaeological excavation under thick layers of sludge. This was a skew bridge over a twisted brook falling in the highway alignment. To my great solace, the site clearance had revealed remains of a lost cemetery (to be specific, skulls and bones) and great variety of snakes (so much for flaura and fauna) - I would be dropped in the site office every morning and will be picked up in the evening. The site office was a tent with few basic amenities like tables and chairs, overlooking a beautiful mango orchard and a semi dried up brook. I had to endure a whole day in the jungle all alone with one or two excavators to stare at. In a very short period, I developed heartfelt feelings for guys sentenced in jails. Though I sensed stagnation, I had made up my mind not to give up early, this stage was probably insignificant in the big scheme of things ;) - it was indeed.

I had plenty of time at hand and nothing to do then - In a bid to save my sanity, I indulged in doodling and designed car prototypes in my notepad - sadly no one in automobile industry knew about my existence then. Once I got bored with cars, I became friends with the Telugu Hitachi operator Ramu (Ramudu oka manchi baludu ?= Ramu is a good boy) - a slender fellow, hardly in his teens, and made a deal with him to teach me to operate the Hitachi. He was more than glad to educate his great site Engineer and soon I learned how to operate this complicated machine - actually it’s more like a video game - joystick for rotating the cabin/boom - another joystick for moving the stick and bucket and simple push-pull lever for moving forward or backward, but you need practice to use them all synchronously - I even loaded few tippers in the waves of enthusiasm. Thankfully no major accidents happened. After the foundation concrete was poured, the floods saved me from there and I ended up in a normal half a kilometer long bridge site (Paleru Bridge).

Unfortunately RTA examiners never knew about my versatile skills, and confused me with one of the ordinary. Each failed test made me more humble, humbler, humblest? After the tests, though one will be sure of the outcome intuitively, I never gave up hope and waited till the four letter word (fail or pass) was written on my assessment sheet. One of the test examiners wrote "fali" instead of "fail" in the sheet and how I yearned to point out the misspelling. I refrained from doing that only for being a firm believer of Murphy's Laws - God bless, somehow i didnt fali in my seventh test.