A new look for your old car

A quick thought about a new look for our cars.

I was traveling in an auto rickshaw through the rain stricken roads of Chennai when this thought occured to me. To those who do not know/ have not experienced the pathetic traffic conditions of this city, please have a look at one of my earlier post on the city.

Here the vehicles have very high rate of PDA and no moral policing applies for them, so you know they are an indisciplined lot. When my rick was bumped at the back by an oncoming car, I became desperate to find a solution for this recurrent problem.

I wondered how about having a very large car top carrier with edges fitted with rubber cushions or some other form of shock absorbers so that they protrude beyond the area of the car and thus ensure a safe distance between adjacent vehicles at all times?

Then, I thought why not put this to some good use? Since I am hearing everything solar around me these days, it didn't take a long time for the thought to take form. Cover the roof with solar panels that will power the car's air conditioners. Now from the energy saver's point of view, this has added advantage.

Sun ->Heat -> Solar power->AC
No sun/No heat ->No solar power ->No AC!

If it is hot, your AC will work. Otherwise, it will not! Smart right?

Now, will this not make my car very expensive? Hell yeah! And hence I say the government must make this compulsory as part of PUC certificate. Because of this, the number of cars on the road will reduce drastically and with that the traffic as well. People will prefer public transport, so less polution and congestion!

Most road problems addressed in one single shot; Howzzat?!
[Poppin' my collar with pride, and yeah... NO BRICKBATS PLEASE! My insurance has not been renewed yet! :-) ]

The story of my experiments with Pragyan

As a disclaimer I must admit that it is not just me but a small team of us who´ve done the experiment and everything bad must be hurled at all of us equally For the good ones... I am always there!

We worked towards Pragyan for almost a year and many weird and creative ideas were brought up in this course of time; while some survived, many never made it to Pragyan´10. And now that Pragyan is over I feel its time to let the cat out of the bag.

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1. Abhinav ka Swayamvar

Probably the most weirdo publicity idea ever in a techfest, but Pragyan was determined to gain a strong ground within the NITT campus.

Inspired by Sir Richard Branson´s strategies, and also ´Rakhi ka Swayamvar´ this unique publicity model was devised by me! With the number of female fans of the Pragyan ´chocolate-boy chairman´ growing by the hour, it was planned to have a one day reality show in EEE Audi or Barn stage challenging the girls of 2nd year UG to fight it out for a date with our KursiPurush.

But due to fear of excessive competition and predicted increase in the number of in-campus patients suffering from mental trauma (those who fail to win the challenge) the idea was called off based on the recommendation of WHO. It is understood from Opal that a bunch of girls had already started preparing themselves for the event and hence were mighty disappointed at its cancellation.

2. Controversies and Conspiracies

In our attempt to devise a new scheme for ´effective publicity´ Mradul and I came up with this idea of publicising through controversies. The possible controversies we thought of included,

a. Hacking into a secured server and mailng the pragyan participants,
b. Being the first to release a controversial news (´The Almighty´ style),
c. Writing a controversial book on the flaws in the college education system of the country,
d. Bringing down a very controversial speaker to the campus and make him talk on something very very infalmmatory,
e. Demanding a separate statehood for NIT Trichy and making Pragyan its official festival (holidays!!! ),
f. Joining hands with a local political party for joint youth operations ahead of Pragyan to ensure good media coverage.


Majority of these ideas were rejected on the grounds of possible criminal cases in the future against the Pragyan orgainsers and since our already packed schedule did not give us the time for the jail adventure, we had to call off ´Operation CnC´.

3. For the flyers

Pragyan is an international techno-management festival conducted in the area that falls in the landing zone of the flights that are about to land in the Tiruchi international airport. To capitalise on this Mradul came up with this amazing idea of writing Pragyan 2010 in big, bold letters on the road from CLC to SBI ATM so that the people on the flight will notice it and thus the participation for Pragyan will increase!

¨What an idea Sirji!¨

4. Vada Pav Stall

Since majority of the core members of this Pragyan have lived in Bombay and have at least once longed for Vada Pav in Trichy, a collective decision was taken to have a Vada Pav stall from Bombay during Pragyan. Arya, the head of Marketing team was forced to hunt for prospective vada pav sellers who could bring their stock to Trichy during Pragyan.

But this idea was dropped after the members of the marketing team failed miserably in explaining to these vada pav sellers the location of Trichy, which they thought was not a part of mainland India !

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These are just some of the many ideas that we thought of implementing in Pragyan´10. Of course there are these other ideas that were more serious type and which were actually implemented during Pragyan!

But who wants to boast about them ?!