Pimping, Tinkering

For a few days before I joined my teammates on the Rickshaw Run, Rogier had been referring to our noble chariot as "Johnny." I had to explain to him, in English that a Dutchman might understand, that you never, ever give a vehicle a male moniker. He especially, should have known this rule, because, being freaky-deaky-Dutch, he was constantly warning us about jinxing the trip. So we plugged the iPod into our Rickshaw Radio, via cassette converter, and started thinking about names. Eric Clapton's "Lay Down Sally" came on, and that's how Sally was christened.

In telling this story, I'm given pause by my own mention of the Rickshaw Radio. I know what you're thinking. How did we get a radio? The simple answer is by paying 1,600 rupees, about four times what it's worth, for an incompetent auto-audio guy to solder a piece of junk radio to our dashboard in Hyderabad, but the Radio is really a part of a much more important part of the Rickshaw Run, which has to do with a certain degree of tender-loving care we gave Sally. On the RR website, this pampering was called "Distance Pimping" (for the geriatrics in my blog audience, that's a reference to the MTV program "Pimp My Ride," a reality show in which the rapper Xzibit chooses a lucky viewer each week with a beat-up car, then "pimps" it by repairing and sprucing up the body, the interior, the sound system, and most importantly, the hubcaps -- which are called "rims"), but we found that a little bit demeaning, so we called it "tinkering," or towards the end of the Run, "prettying up Sally". Rogier, Dutch as he is, would always mutter, "Saucy little minx!" in a strange accent every time we did something to pretty-up Sally, which I found strange, but I rolled with it. The radio:



It takes a lot of work to get a rickshaw looking like THIS:



Sally's paintjob, in stunning turquoise and grey, was done with a sponge by Benji at the outset of the event. I wasn't there, but I'm told that Rogier and Benji fought like a married couple about it, but eventually agreed that it looked good in the end. In fact, that bickering is actually all anyone remembers of Benji and Rogier at the start, as we found when we met up with the rest of the teams at the end. In any case, we didn't win the best paint job prize at the end of the trip, but we did paint some slogans, like "Three-Wheelin' to Darjeelin'" on the wheel-wells, and "Horn OK Please" on the rear fender. Here's Rogier modelling...



Both the above and below pictures were taken while we were putting on our shiny steel rims, which we purchased for about Rs. 50 (less than $1.25) at a village auto-parts stand. Needless to say, we were the only rimmed-out team on the run.



Here's Sally's underbelly (she's so immodest), taken just before she got her oil changed. Benji and I tried to give her the oil change ourselves, but had hardly found the drain plug when a loyal employee of the Tata Motors service center in Jarkhand stepped in. We discovered the same day that Sally's muffler was loose, which is why she was roaring like Rosie O'Donnell instead of purring like the proper Greta Garbo that she was.



Prettying-up also meant lots of stickers depicting the freaky-deaky pantheon of Hindu gods. We were looking for the rickshaw-walla's trinity: Ganesh flanked by Jesus and the Virgin Mary, which you see surprisingly often in India, but the Christian decal men were nowhere to be found. Here's Benji putting on stickers:



Ganesh, alone, on the front flank, plus an orange bead-and-flower garland that we put on the front to balance out Rogier's national fervour with the American and Australian flag bandanas that waved from Sally's rear-views.



And here, if you can make it out in the bottom right-hand corner, is our radio. We only had one working iPod, and obviously it was Rogier's, so we were stuck listening to Rod Stewart's greatest hits, some Dutch band called Blof, some Maroon 5/Jack Johnson/John Mayer mom-rock, and some Eurotrash DJ crew called the Freemasons, who Rogier insisted to me "really pushed the limit" with their beats. There were a few redeeming songs on the playlist, however, including Charles & Eddie's 1992 dance hit "Would I Lie to You?".

The radio fell out somewhere in Chattisgarh due to a sub-standard soldering job, and was dragged about 10 meters by a loose cable. We re-attached her, now without a front face and fastened to the dash with some copper wires we found, but she was really never the same again, and more and more, we had to resort to using the guitar we brought along to accompany Rogier's improvised, free-form funk songs about his experiences as an NGO worker treating scabies infections at rural Maharashtran schools, which was entertaining, and prevented drowsiness, but wasn't quite the same as having the luxury of "Handbags and Gladbags" blasted through scratchy speakers over the hum of the motor.