Autobiography of a self-driving car in India

I was born in a factory in Shanghai and airdropped to India on the orders of a wealthy owner. I am proud of my shining skin, my powerful headlamps, my posh interiors, and of course my powerful eyes (cameras) and ears (ultra sound sensors and radars). I feel embarrassed to talk about my brain that is able to synthesise information from all these sources and makes split second decisions to enable safe and efficient transportation for my master. My master is a well-dressed man but portly and well-rounded and squeezes himself into the seat. I adjust my suspensions each time he sits so that I am on level. I must remind him to put on his seat belt every time since he is almost always on a phone call while entering the car and forgets the simplest of the acts to protect oneself. 

The first day I took him out was a good experience. It was a holiday with not much traffic on the road. The destination he chose was a straight road to a posh club and back. Barring a few bumps on the road that strained my suspensions a little and the stray dogs and cattle that came across the road, the travel was mostly uneventful and I was not stressed at all. I started to enjoy the music my master played each time- a mixture of western classical, pop music and Hindi film songs. I especially liked the song -'Chalti ka naam gadi' song of Kishore kumar. Only later I realised what it means. 

The second outing was a disaster from the word go. My master wanted to test me in real traffic- peak hour traffic in middle of the city on a weekday. I saw vehicles coming from all directions at me- missing me by few millimeters- I froze. As soon as I stopped, there was a cacophony of honking that made me nearly deaf. Now I was very irritable but my master appeared at home- calm and enjoying the music while my blood pressure shot through the roof. 

Suddenly I found that red light here does not mean 'you have to stop'. Nor does a ' one way' sign mean you cannot drive in opposite direction. Usually it is left to the discretion of the drivers to do what is most convenient for them. My brain was confused with all this out of syllabus information. I started off when the traffic light became green. Suddenly a car that was to my left darted across my path on to the path of vehicles coming in the opposite direction and towards a lane. Every body honked including the car that is weaving its way between the vehicles. Even I honked- incidentally I felt very proud of my voice- a voice good for an Alto singer. Contrast this with the low rumble and bass tone of a city bus horn or the squeaky voice of some of the other cars. Then I realised that the 'communal honking' is a way of communion- a sense of bonding and belonging. It does not reflect 'anger' or 'jest'. They neither aided nor obstructed the car to go across the traffic and in the wrong direction. I was amazed at this 'tolerance'. 

My hard wired brain refused to change. I continued to wait patiently at traffic lights and my progress in general has been one of stop-go-stop-go with more 'stops' than 'gos'. Obviously this irritated my master. I heard him mumbling that in his next trip to Shanghai, he will request for a soft ware update that includes permission to go through red light; go in wrong direction if that means a shorter distance to travel; to honk whenever my ultra sound sensor detects any thing in their range; reduce the limits of the distance from other vehicles before I come to a stop etc. 

I was very worried and so thought of any other solution for this dilemma. What struck me was that if my creator can device a spherical car in which the interiors stay upright always (like some of the toys), the car can have a navigation system modelled on the lines of 'Brownian motion'. Like the molecules of a fast flowing liquid, I can find my way through wherever there is a gap- bouncing my way across highways, streets, lanes, foot paths etc. While I was busy creating in my mind a spherical car, I was hit from all sides by cars fighting for space and my roughly boxlike shape slowly turned towards a spherical shape but with a difference- I had to be sent to the scrapyard!