Vikram's cars

Vikram has had a long and tortured history with cars. For the first year and a half that he was with us, Vikram owned cheap cars on the use and dispose model. What that meant was that every 6 months or so, Vikram would go out and buy a $400 car, and then get rid of it 6 months later when it stopped working. As an economic model it is hard to find fault with this M.O.

Our earliest experience with his car was back in 2003, soon after he had started. Our colo at the time was in San Francisco, and I needed Vikram to go with me and set up something on this new Linux server we were trying out at the time. I had taken the train in to work, so Vikram drove us back to the city. As soon as we got on the 101, it started raining. Of course, the wipers don't work so well on a $400 car. "Don't worry about that," Vikram said, "if we drive fast enough, the rain will slide right off." All the way, the windows barely hold up, and the howling wind with the rain make for a fine driving experience.

We drive to the city and fix the server and get back in the car. Vikram puts the key in the ignition, and I notice that it has gotten rather foggy very quickly. Vikram agreed. Then I pointed out that for fog, it smelled a little too much like burning car. We quickly got out of the car and opened the hood to see a steaming pile of car in front of us. We hung around for a while waiting for the car to cool off. Eventually, we got back in the car, and Vikram put it in drive. Except the car wouldn't move forward. He put it in reverse, and it moved backwards of course. Vikram pointed out that he could reverse his way back to Palo Alto, and was quite happy to do so. As a slightly responsible founder, I had to demur. So Vikram came up with an alternative idea, "I'll just leave my car parked here, surely eventually the city will just tow it away, and it won't be my problem any more," he said. That seemed more responsible to me and we moved forward on that plan. Eventually, Vikram had to tow his own car to a junkyard, pay the city about $500 in fines for leaving his car on the side of the street and buy a new car.

This new car ran well for a while but eventually reached the end of its lifetime also. Vikram took it in to the mechanic to find out what to do about it, and the mechanic asked him when the last time he put oil in the car. "Oil?" asked Vikram. Apparently, Vikram had had no idea that an engine needed to be kept lubricated. That was the end of that car. So Vikram left it parked in the office parking lot while he considered what to do with it. Except, a few days later the car was missing. Turns out our landlord decided the car was a blight on the landscape (we're talking east bayshore here, not the world's prettiest landscape) and had it towed. And the towing company charged Vikram a couple hundred bucks to have it junked.

The economics of the use and dispose method begins to break down if every time you dispose you give up as much as you spent getting the car in the first place. Having come to this reluctant conclusion himself, Vikram then proceeded to get himself a brand new Passat. It being a new car, the guys decided to drive down to Tahoe and go skiing over the weekend. We had Barker and Vesko in Barker's car in front, and Kevin and Vikram in Vikram's new Passat following them. It was snowing quite heavily, and of course Vikram had no chains, and of course Vikram drove as if it was sunny and dry. (If you've never sat in a car driven by Vikram, it is a well recommended experience. All the thrills of sky diving, none of the expense!). A car a few cars in front slid off the freeway and the others behind braked hard. Vikram braked hard too, only he was going a little too fast. The car spun out, Vikram turned the wheel, hit the brakes harder, and while he was at it, hit the gas as well for good measure. The car rotated through 3 or 4 turns, and came to a halt in front of Barker's car, in the meantime not having touched any other car or roadside object in the process. All the while, Kevin sat praying for his health, and also promised his personal God never to ride with Vikram again.

My Vikram experience

On my first day at EF, I was taken to a rather small room, extremely untidy with empty packets of flaming hot chips lying around, an old pair of shoes and assorted computer hardware etc lying around.

I was rather chuffed that I had an office, but it turned out I was sharing it with a guy called Vikram, who I had met a few times at Stanford and who I know talked very fast and with very high bandwidth.

It turned out sharing an office with Vikram was the best place a new EF engineer could be placed, given he knew everything and you felt you could ask the stupid questions you may hesitate to ask Dr K or Anand.

Vikram worked a lot, and he worked a lot on the move. Have laptop and a internet connection, will code was his philosophy. From Stanford, from various airports on his way to the east coast, from office. I sometimes called Vikram 'Mr Wolf' (he solved problems).

Vikram was also a big proponent of Web 0.1. He is to date the only person I know who actually really used lynx (a text based browser) rather than a browser that showed pictures and stuff. Indeed, the ACM was built and debugged using lynx until the sad day when an unsuspecting piece of Web 1.0 crept in in the form of Javascript to login (!!) and lynx had to be dropped (although not without some searching through sourceforge i feel). And the ACM did look good on lynx.

Vikram did not watch baseball or football or reruns of ESPN news; he watched CSPAN. Between him and Anand (and the occasional contribution from dg), I was educated on the finer points of the US political landscape.

We all thought marriage would change Vikrams work hours, but even though he's in Chennai I am often chatting to him at 2pm PST, and he's often at some airport when he calls in to the weekly Infrastructure meeting. So, reassuringly, nothing has changed.

Vikram eggplant eater

Vikram is a fussy eater. There are very few cuisines he will eat:

• Thai Food: A particular favorite, but only if he gets to eat Eggplant green curry. (Preferably from Amarin Thai).
• Indian Food: But only channa batura (even at Chevron Bevron)
• Pizza: But only cheese, with huge and liberal helpings of crushed peppers on top
• Subway sandwich: But just toasted with cheese and jalapenos

It was quite the shock to David White's and my system when he started here 4 years ago, and when we asked him to go get lunch with us, he assured us that he would rather go to the Pizza Hut in the Target store across the street and get himself a cheese pizza. David White and I of course pride ourselves on our discriminating culinary taste, and it was surprising to us that somebody would enjoy eating just cheese pizzas from Pizza Hut. But here he was in flesh and blood.

Back in the day, we used to get dinner at the office every day and around 6pm, David would make the rounds, "taking a census," as I called it, to find out what people wanted for dinner. With Vikram the answer was always simple, "Thai Food," and "eggplant green curry." Of course, we couldn't possibly have Thai food everyday, so we would have to get other cuisines, and Vikram would rather starve than eat a non-approved cuisine.

Vikram could of course eat eggplant green curry 3 meals a day if he wanted, so strong was his commitment to the food. This one time when we were at the Castro Office, he decided to go out and get some for lunch. He asked Nick Hristov if he would like some, and Nick said, "sure." So Vikram goes out and gets some extra spicy curry and gives Nick his little box of food. Five minutes later, there's an explosion in Nick's cube, smoke coming out of Nick's ears, Nick rolling around the floor in pain and trying to put out the fire in his mouth. That was the last time ever that Nick had Thai food.

Needless to say, this was unfortunate for us. If both of them were having dinner with us, there was nothing we could get, one guy would only have Thai food, the other would definitely not.