Transportation semester has been the most interesting.
Either you have to sit on the footpath like a homeless,
usually accompanied by homeless, from sunrise to sunset and count the cars and
2 wheeler, 2, 3 and multi-axle trucks, and the cycles and handcarts, and tally
mark them on the survey sheet, or record their speeds, from the time they took
to pass you and your flag-wala friend, or just stop the vehicles and politely
ask them 'ekkede nincho osthunnaru, ekkede elthunnaru and endi purpose?' (Where
are you coming from, where are you going to and why?) and they will close the
window on your face...Bingo! You have successfully failed to obtain a data! Of
course you can comfortably sit at some Chai dukhan and doze the day off given
Bhaskar sir doesn't jump around like a ninja with a camera out of nowhere.
And then there is this part, where you go to houses around
the city and ask them how much were they earning, and how old their daughter
is, where all did they go yesterday and why, and how', you can bet has been the
best of the surveys (given, you don't understand abuses in Telugu) ! The
coolest survey was to note the speed of the hired air-conditioned Toyota Innova
while roaming around the city... obviously not from the speedometer, but from
stop watch and the distance covered. Parking survey wasn't too bad either, you
have to sit in front of BigBazaar whole day and enjoy the crowd and food there,
but just keep filling the sheets with random licence numbers of vehicles
allegedly park on the street. An upset stomach, a famished wallet, and nosy
people around, adds to the fun.
And at the end of the day, you return to hostel with swollen
legs and burnt face, and your archi mates look at you with utmost pity and
prays 'God, bless them!' and that completes your survey day! Later you feed
those data into Excel and conjure up beautiful pie-charts out of them and stack
them up in sheets, which would later be your death omen, at the jury!
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