Pinto Has An Idea

by Rajeev Saxena

  ‘Superb.’

  ‘We can also motivate maids to get these medicines from their employers and drop them over at our office. The more they do it, the more free medicines they get.’

  ‘Now, I’m really impressed.’

  ‘I feel that charity should be run like a business—with a proper infrastructure. It was really great meeting you, Madam. Looks like there are some patients waiting.’

  EIGHTEEN

  P

  into remembered the old days when the family retainer, Dauja, would come to his house and he’d ride on the man’s bullock-cart. It was a very bumpy ride on dirt roads on account of the unstable movements of the bullocks. The carriage didn’t have shock absorbers and didn’t have any seats either. There was only an extremely dirty cushion to sit on the floor of the cart. On top of everything, Dauja was continuously scolding the bullocks in his loud village dialect. But, oh boy, was it fun! The joy Pinto felt when he got to ride in the cart was beyond description and couldn’t even compare with how he felt now when he rode a limo or sat in the business class of an airplane.

  Lavanya entered the room, ‘Honey, what are you thinking about?’ ‘Oh, I was thinking about the bullock-cart rides of my childhood,’ Pinto smiled ruminatively.

  ‘I feel like I’ve just had one,’ said Lavanya rubbing her back. The two had returned from Imran’s bungalow in Goa where they’d celebrated the astounding success of their last project. Fun as it had been having free time together, the drive was murder. Lavanya and Pinto found their limbs aching from the distances over potholed roads they’d been jolted the entire way there and back.

  Pinto was just as bruised. ‘Even after so many years of independence, we are not able to build good roads in India,’ he grumbled to his wife.

  ‘People can build good roads even in darkest Africa,’ Lavanya snapped back. ‘You should think of a way for the betterment of transport in our own country.’ She was still cranky and tired over the inconvenience they’d faced.

  ‘Yes, that might be a good problem to look into. Why don’t you join me as a partner?’ Pinto said, to unruffle her feathers.

  ‘Sure, why not?’ She’d cheered up immediately. ‘Let’s do some research.’

  In a week, Lavanya had come up with a thorough study. ‘Transportation,’ she began, ‘especially the idea of human transportation, has always been of overriding interest to the inventive mind. And throughout history, slow and gradual improvements were made on its many modes. Two big inventions revolutionized the movement of man and his goods: the invention of the wheel and the invention of the engine.’

  ‘Any other gems from ancient history?’ asked Pinto wrily.

  Lavanya looked at her husband with narrowed eyes. ‘Are you seriously interested, or are you making fun of me?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘I knew it. Anyway… no matter which era, there has always been a divide between the rich and the poor when travelling. The rich have always invested in luxury vehicles whether they were palkis, or palanquins supported by long poles on the shoulders of men, horse-carriages, and then trains, luxury liners, cars, or airplanes. The poor used public transport or cheaper options like bullock-carts and bicycles. The important component of travel is speed. With the evolution of transportation, speed has continued to increase over time.’

  ‘Interesting but well-known facts—I hope there’s more to your research,’ said Pinto as if speaking from a lectern.

  Lavanya looked at him as if asking him to shut up. ‘Professor Jain taught me about primary and secondary research techniques in my 4th year,’ she said witheringly.

  Pinto neither shut up nor withered. ‘Share your research, please.’

  ‘A large, developed country like the USA has 4.12 million miles of road capacity. As per American Road and Transportation Builders Association, between 2000 and 2013, US Population grew by 12 per cent and licensed drivers by 11 per cent. but the capacity of the highway system increased only by 5.3 per cent, which meant roads were becoming a little more congested every day.’

  ‘I could see that every day on highway 101 in California,’ Pinto recalled.

  ‘But listen to this,’ said Lavanya. ‘Roads cover only six-tenths of one per cent of land in the US, excluding Alaska. Road density, which is measured in kilometres of road per 100 square kilometres of land area, is usually dependent upon population density; for instance, as per Knoema, the road density in India was 142 in 2011 compared to only 67 in the US in the same year. These figures represented population pressure. On the other hand, a lot of European countries had much higher road density. The UK had 172 and Germany had 180.’

  ‘And I used to think that we had covered a sizeable portion of our land with roads!’ replied Pinto, now thoroughly impressed by the direction of Lavanya’s thought. ‘Doesn’t look anymore like that is the case.’

  Lavanya help up her hand. ‘One more thing. In India, we have 3.32 km road per 1,000 people, while in the US, there were 22 km of road available for the same number of people.’

  ‘No wonder they call the US a developed country. By the way, did you do any study on which mode of transport is the most efficient?’

  ‘Yes, I did. They say that depends on the context,’ said Lavanya. ‘But trains can indisputably carry a lot more passengers in the space available, and they don’t get stuck in traffic jams.’

  ‘But they are not good from point-to-point connectivity,’ argued Pinto.

  ‘That’s why I said it all depends on the context. Why don’t we meet a few experts as well, and ask their views about transportation?’

  They met a Professor Bhargava who put things in perspective for them. ‘Distances,’ he said, ‘can’t always be measured in terms of miles or metres. Sometimes they can be described in the time taken to cover a stretch of land, sea or air. If you ask, for instance, someone in India how far a certain place is, he’ll tell you “five km”, but in the Western countries, they’d describe the distance as ‘five minutes’ away’. It is a geo-political difference in conjunction with the type of infrastructure used. In India, it is unpredictable how traffic would be in an hour or what the road conditions are at any given time, so it is difficult to say how much time it’d take from one point to another.’

  A traffic inspector provided some further insights: ‘Cars can go at much greater speed than what the roadways actually allow, so when we talk about speed of transport, we are talking about the permissible speed on roads, not of the cars themselves. Public transport is an efficient alternative mode of transportation and especially useful to reduce the pressure on roads, but people will only be interested in public transportation if it is available in abundance. If they have to wait really long for government-run buses, they’d rather drive their private vehicles.’

  When the couple came home, Pinto asked Lavanya, ‘Do you know why they don’t create a dense network of tracks… just like they do with roads?’

  Lavanya hazarded a guess. ‘Is it because they think it might prove too expensive? And more than that, tracks need controlled movement over them. With a dense network of them, discipline would fly out of the window!’

  ‘But there is a big difference between roadways and a track-based system,’ Pinto pointed out. ‘There is only one driver in charge of transporting thousands of people along a set track. In the case of cars, there is usually one driver per person. It is human nature to err, so by involving thousands of drivers on the road versus one on the track, you exponentially increase the risk of errors—and thereby the numbers of accidents and traffic jams.’

  ‘So you find a solution,’ Lavanya said. Secretly she believed her husband could perform miracles, although she’d rather die than tell him that. ‘To tell you the truth, I never had any confidence in you in earlier times. But now that I’m using your Goodsnet, Ghumantu and Double H so much, and my problems and worktime have been so greatly reduced, I know for sure you’ll be able to solve this as well.’

  ‘You helped at every step so the credit goes
to you too. Listen, I’m getting another idea. How about merging tracks and roads together?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If there are a lot of carriages attached to trains, cars could easily be loaded and unloaded off them. A person can transport their car aboard a train for a long distance, until the train comes to a given junction near their destination. That is when he unloads the car and drives the remaining short way to the destination. Combining both systems can reduce the number of cars on the roads and possibly, reduce pollution-levels as well.’

  ‘My darling scientist husband, it’ll not work. Loading and unloading cars will break the flow of a journey. Nobody wants to do that.’

  ‘You have a point, Lavanya. But I still have a hunch that I’ve cracked the code—I just need some cosmetic touches for my plan to proceed. Please order something nice to eat—and lots of it. Boy, all this thinking uses up the contents of my stomach faster than those of my brain!’

  Lavanya ordered hot samosa from Puttu’s shop which came pretty fast via the chute. An idea sprang to Pinto’s receptive mind. When his samosa could travel in a Goodsnet chute, why not a car? His design for the modern highway was on its way.

  ‘Lavanya, I’ve got a solution. Come here.’

  ‘That was fast.’

  ‘We drive on the left side in India,’ he said, getting up and gesticulating energetically to illustrate his point. So there could be three lanes of conveyer belts set to different speeds. For instance, the rightmost lane could run at 100 kmph, the leftmost would have a speed of around 40, and the middle one at 70.’ Here, he changed hands. ‘The leftmost belt would be connected through entry and exit ramps. The entry/exit stations would be located each and every km or two in the city, and every 5 km apart outside the city, with all stations automated. No human intervention would be required. The driver will swipe the card, enter the destination on the computer screen, the barrier will open and the car will begin to move just like in an automatic car wash.’

  ‘Fantastic, but what do you mean by an automatic car wash? Also, don’t you think that a sudden change-over from 40 to 70 km per hour could be dangerous and rough?’

  ‘Good question,’ he applauded her majestically, ‘and you have answered it yourself. In the US there is an automatic car wash everywhere. You drive your car into a track and put it in neutral. After that, small cylinders in the track move the car and pass it through various washing systems. Similarly, in this case, though conveyer belts will have speeds as high as 40, 70 and 100, every car would have much more granular speed through individual cylinders around the car wheels. Whenever the system recognizes that it was safe to move to another track, cylinders underneath the car tire would increase the speed and transfer it to the next track smoothly. During exit, lane by lane, the speed will be reduced and the car will be transferred to the final destination ramp.’

  ‘I like it!’ Lavanya clapped her hands in turn. ‘And the commute won’t seem that long to the driver, as his hands will be free to hold up a book to read or do whatever else he wants in a relaxed frame of mind.’ Then, she was worried again. ‘But how will you implement it?’

  ‘With Imran’s help,’ replied Pinto coolly.

  When Pinto explained the whole contraption to Imran, his friend suggested, ‘It’s a big project, so let’s first create a consortium of multiple investors to start a pilot. If we can prove our point, we can make the government our partner. As part of my ritual, I always ask you the name. What should we call this?’

  ‘Lavanya and I thought that since it’s a smart track, we would call it SMtrex.’

  ***

  For a pilot project, they started building infrastructure extending from Kharadi to Hinjewadi in Pune... a stretch of around 30 km.

  Engineers worked day and night to complete the SMTrex project in nine months. Though it served only a small stretch, people came there just for the experience of watching. This, in fact, created congestion around the project area which had turned into a sort of tourist attraction. Investors were getting almost ten times more revenue than expected, although they knew this kind of revenue was not sustainable once the attraction was over.

  However, one thing was proven: it was a success and would remain a successful project in the future. Another part of the project which drew approval from all was that it wasn’t like building roads, which took a lot of time. The only significant time required was to identify the area, acquire the land, and erect the pillars. Once that was done, all the other stuff came factory-made, was assembled on-site, and then was ready to go.

  Pinto realized inventions which were closer to people gave tremendous satisfaction to the inventor. He had acquired such a name that some people called him the Thomas Alva Edison of India. Some of them even compared him to the great Indian scientist, Nobel Laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan.

  One day, he got an invitation to speak at a well-known research institute as a keynote speaker at a conference in Bangalore, to talk about his SMtrex. He accepted the invite.

  NINETEEN

  P

  into took the morning flight to Bangalore with a failing airline as it was the only one available that aligned with his schedule. Lavanya was worried, ‘I don’t like you taking Raja airlines. Half of their staff is not getting their salaries.’ Pinto took it lightly. ‘I trust government authorities ensure proper checks are in place for passenger safety, or the airline wouldn’t have a licence to fly,’ he said carelessly while zipping his suitcase closed.

  ‘Were you ever afraid of flying?’

  ‘Not any more, my scariest plane ride was my first one, simply because it was my first experience.’

  ‘What was your fear?’

  ‘What if the plane crashed, what’d happen to my parents? I was really scared during turbulence; I didn’t know it was a natural occurrence. You won’t understand my nervousness as your first air travel was with Asim, so you didn’t have to go through what I did.’

  And Pinto realized that he had introduced a forbidden name. They did not bring Asim’s name into their conversations unnecessarily. So he continued without giving an opportunity to Lavanya to speak, ‘You won’t believe what a struggle it was for me that time, starting from learning how to attach the baggage-tag to my bag, to how to fasten the seatbelt, to how to open the tray table for lunch.’

  ‘I understand. But you’re getting late now. Off you go. Happy journey.’

  ***

  But today Pinto was reminded of the old fear, when the pilot announced they had to go in for an emergency landing due to a mechanical failure. All the passengers were terrified. What’d happened? Would they ever meet their family and friends again? They began to scream their terrors out loud.

  A bearded passenger sitting next to him yelled for everyone to hear, ‘If I survive, I’ll offer a chadar in the Chisti dargah in Ajmer.’ A miserly looking man sitting across the aisle underwent a sudden public change of personality. He, too, informed everybody within listening distance, ‘I’ll donate half of my assets to the poor if I land safely.’ A Gandhi topiwallah politician resplendent in khadi, was close to weeping. ‘My opponents will be really happy to take my place,’ he said waspishly through his tears. ‘If I survive this time, I’m going to make friends with a lot more people right across the board. After I eventually die—hopefully only of old age—I’d like to leave some genuine mourners behind, not just family.’

  Pinto’s thoughts, although he kept them to himself, ran along more humanitarian lines: ‘Why is God doing this to me when I have so many incomplete tasks? Why work so hard when you have to go like this, unplanned? What’ll happen to Lavanya and Harsha? I’ll work on airplane safety if I come out of this alive.’

  Relief came when the pilot announced that they had some issues with the landing gear, but both wheels were down now and they should be able to land safely.

  Pinto, always sceptical of any publicly vaunted piety, could almost see the vainglorious decisions, made minutes earlier, undergo an about-turn o
n his co-passengers’ faces. The spiritual-looking person had probably changed his mind to, ‘I am a pure soul. I go to the temple every week. Why should I waste my time and money on the dargah?’ The miser was looking like he was also doing some numbers-crunching, ‘Why should I donate my hard-earned assets? I only made that promise under emotional duress, which was really foolish. I offer lungar every month, and feeding people for free is in itself a good-enough donation. If I was to deprive myself of 50 per cent of my assets, who’d offer the lungar?’ The politician must have shrewdly rethought, ‘I am already doing a service to the people. What’s wrong if I take a little money from the rich for getting some work done? All my power I have earned through hard work.’

  By now, almost everybody appeared to have blithely changed their minds except Pinto. He still looked sad, realizing that people really only care about one person, themselves. But was selfishness a symptom of a greater problem, or was it just human nature, and we all had to merely deal with it? Pinto didn’t know, nor could he devise an experiment to gain a clear understanding of the answer.

  By the time they touched ground, news of the emergency landing had gone viral on TV. As he was a well-known personality in India by now, several TV reporters fired questions at him. After almost an hour, when all the interviews were over, he realized that he hadn’t switched on his mobile phone. There were calls waiting from a furious Lavanya. ‘I’ve been trying you for an hour!’ she shouted as soon as he got through. Thank God I saw you on TV, but this is the height of irresponsibility. You should have talked to me first, before talking to news reporters.’

  Pinto’s relief had also made him a bit angry. ‘I’ve just escaped death, and all you can do is shout at me.’