For a number of years, the California DMV used to have a standard message on all it's highway/freeway billboards - "Drive slow, Save lives". Considering it is California, naturally, no one ever drove slow.
But this time around, the DMV has seem to have found a winning caption. They just added two words to the original caption. "Save fuel". If that actually puts things in perspective, humanity, as a whole, needs a swift kick in the posterior.
I tend to think of humans as a bunch of noisy women in Mid-May Madras, talking endlessly about why [Insert teary-eyed mega serial heroine here] and [Insert shabbily-dressed serial director who decided to play hero] are going through such tough times, not realizing that their pots are overflowing with water and getting wasted (In Madras, this ranks somewhere in between sneezing loudly when Federer is on championship point against Nadal at Wimbledon and pressing the "Don't Press This. Ever" button on the Doomsday Device). I also see God as this corpulent, sweaty, swarthy corporation guy in khaki who looks at all this callousness, throws in a few choice abuses, kicks the pots up in the air and closes down the tap ruthlessly.
Additional DMV note: When I park the car between two stationary vehicles, I usually look at both of them to see how "car-savvy" they are. This later-day wisdom arrived after parking next to "unsavvy" SUVs who put on a few dings on the front side. An already dinged car is "unsavvy" since the guy driving should have been careless to get dinged up, while an expensive, clean-cut car is "savvy" since, at the least, the guy knows the pain of getting dinged and would watch out. At the DMV, I do my usual check. The car on the left looks okay, slightly dinged, but okay - sort of "savvy", but "not savvy enough". The car on the right was slightly different though. It had bullet holes. Bullet Holes. Wow. Thats a clean "armed and dangerous". Quite literally.
Additional California note: The Bay Area has perhaps the highest concentration of rice eaters after the TN-Andhra belt. Understandably, the rice stock hit a new low and the prices started shooting up. As I was pondering what happened to all the bags of rice which disappeared like Vittalacharya props from the shelves, I am told that highly educated, sophisticated, americanized, intellectual NRIs are buying twice as many 20Lb bags as there are people at home. That would feed a small nation during a nuclear winter for god's sake.
Surplus-Additional California note: In debating over the title of this post, Led Zeppelin wins a three way competition over RHCP and The Mamas & The Papas. Zep rules.
Read on ... (at your own peril, obviously) ...
