http://www.duronenergy.com/news/?p=44
The heat is bearing down on our little two-wheel scooter, the heat and the horns and the dust of the Ahmedabad streets. Our speed slows to a jerking, unsteady crawl as we weave through the packed streets of the old city. Somewhere in this packed, jostling expanse is a store that sells oscilloscopes, a fundamental tool for the electrical engineering bench, and we’re making our wobbly way to it. A huge bus lurches to a stop an inch behind us, releasing an explosive sigh of its air brakes and a deafening blast of its horn. I can feel the blasts of heat from its engine, breathing down my neck, and I’m suddenly very aware of the tiny difference between its bumper and my spine. From my perch on the back of the scooter, I nervously squirm, feeling vulnerable, and tighten my grip on the bike as we force our way through throngs of shoppers, food vendors, speeding motorcyclists, buses, bicycles and children. Preetam, my friend and fellow engineer is driving the bike, somehow unfazed by this universe of activity surrounding us. Twisting around in my seat to look behind us, I stare straight into the lazy, implacable eyes of a camel, casually flapping its lips as it pulls a cart through the street. Staring at the camel’s whiskery face, I think back to my boss’ whiskery face at my first electrical engineering job, heart in my 22-year-old throat as I asked him to buy me an oscilloscope to use debugging electronic circuits.
Back then, in the immaculate, air-conditioned office, the hard part was making the case that I needed an expensive piece of equipment, and that the increased quality of my work was worth the investment. Here at DWPower, I’d asked for an oscilloscope and my boss, an engineer himself, said “sure! If you need one, go get one!”
That was the easy part.
The hard part was coming up.
You see, Ahmedabad, India, where I work, is not an oscilloscope-friendly kind of town. When you go into downtown, you’re likely to see lively street vendors, elephants trundling through the streets, restaurants and beggars and motorcycles and juice stalls. Oscilloscope stores, not so much. I realized that without ubiquitous Radio Shacks, web commerce and next-day fedex delivery, I fall into a kind of paralysis, unable to take a high-level vision, wave my fingers and make things happen. Not speaking the Ahmedabadi language and unused to the city, finding an oscilloscope store, or even a grocery store, for that matter, seems as intimidating a task as flying to the moon. But there’s a well known fact in India–anything you want–anything at all, you can find in the dusty back streets of the cities. My co-worker Preetam, who’d spent much of his childhood in Ahmedabad, volunteered to show me this Indian magic trick.
“We’re getting close,” Preetham said from the front of the scooter. I look around, but can’t make out anything in the crush of the crowd that would conceivably sell electronic measurement equipment. We park the bike, which is just as well, since we’d been traveling at walking speed, and start looking around. Preetam asks people in Gujarati where we can get electronic meters, and a variety of responses flood in. Everybody offers advice–someone tells us to go just down the block, someone else tells us to go to the next town over, 40km away, and a third man sadly shakes his head, saying that there are no oscilloscopes in Ahmedabad. As we walk through the streets, I get a lot of stares. There’s maybe 200 foreigners in Ahmedabad, a city of 4.5 million, and it’s pretty rare to see a firingi, a foreigner like myself. Men take my hand as we walk, saying “Which country? What is your name?” I have fleeting conversations with the men before running to keep up with Preetam, who strides through the crowd undeterred. We eventually make our way to a tiny doorway crammed in between two ceiling fan shops. The sign on the door reads “Meter World”.
Pushing our way through a narrow hallway crammed with people, we make our way to the desk. Preetam starts speaking in rapid Gujarati, and while my eyes adjust to the dim interior, I look around in wonder. The small shop is filled, floor to ceiling, with piles of multimeters, oscilloscopes, light meters and every other piece of measurement equipment you can see. Huge, Dr. Seuss-like piles of boxes stretch up to the ceiling, towering over us in an intimidating, impossible way. This entire store, I think, could come crashing down at any moment. I could be buried here in a tomb of oscilloscopes.
Someone plunks a hefty catalog in front of me and tells me in broken English to pick out an oscilloscope I like. I thumb through it. There’s one oscilloscope in the catalog. “I’ll take that one!” I say.
The store owner dispatches someone to go get the oscilloscope from their warehouse and I run to an ATM to withdraw the ~$300 US to pay for it. The money in Indian rupees is a thick sheaf of bills about as large as my calf. I struggle for a while to shove them into my wallet, then give up and cram them into my back pocket, my pants jutting out awkwardly around the wad of money. Preetam and I walk back to the store, sit on a couch underneath a groaning shelf of multimeters, and we wait.
and we wait.
And wait, in the heat and the dust. The fans overhead creak and strain but produce no real wind. The noise from the street and the arguments in the crowded shop are deafening. While we stand there, crowds come in and out of the shop. Everyone in Ahmedabad, it seems, wants a multimeter. Over all of this, stockboys pass heavy boxes back and forth over our heads.
Two hours later, the runner comes back through the door with a large box. He opens it and pulls out an oscilloscope completely different from the one in the catalog. Actually, it’s a very bad one, without the features we need. “This is no good!” we protest, “We want the one we picked.” The shop owner scrutinized us, scowling beneath his mustache. “That one is not available here.”
The obvious question hung in the air over us. “Why did you make us wait two hours?” I wanted to scream, but I already knew the answer. We waited two hours because we’re in Ahmedabad. It’s as simple as that. Are you going to sulk over it, are do you want an oscilloscope?
Preetham and the store owner launch into another animated Gujarati conversation. After a few minutes of standing there helplessly, Preetham turns to me and says, “the oscilloscope you want is on the other side of town. We can wait here…” (No! I scream inwardly) “… or you can go over there and pick it up”
I say I’ll pick it up, and the shop owner scribbles and address for a shopping center on the other side of town. Preetham says he has to go do work, so I’m left on my own. I hail a rickshaw and show the driver the address, and we lurch our way there, chasing the mythical oscilloscope across the city. The driver drops me in the middle of nowhere, in an abandoned concrete square somewhere I’ve never seen before. There’s nothing that looks like a shopping center, but he insists that this is the right place before shooting away. I walk around, looking for a passerby, find an old woman crouched in the shade, and ask her in my simple Gujarati where the shopping center is. She points with her stick to a small muddy alley. “That’s the shopping center?” I ask.
“Yes, yes. Just through that alley”
I walk into the alley, sloshing through the mud and puddles and cow dung. “Where the heck,” I think, “am I going to find an oscilloscope in the middle of this?”
As if to answer me, a growl of noise and a shower of sparks flies out of an open doorway, hitting me in the chest. I jerk back–someone’s cutting steel with a grinder. I peer inside the doorway, looking at nine men standing around in the heat of a large machine shop. The name on the shop matched the name on my piece of paper, so I step inside, skirting the stream of sparks. There’s what looks like an office above me, with a steep ladder leading up to it. I climb up and say to the couple men sitting there, “I want to buy an oscilloscope”
“Of course!” one man says, as if this happens all the time. “Sit down, sit down! I am Sandip! Which oscilloscope you want?”
I show him the page from the catalog, and he leaps up and runs into a backroom, shuffling through boxes and papers. A few minutes later, he emerges with the exact oscilloscope I wanted. We plug it in and test it, with several of the machinists climbing up and clustering around in curiosity to see what a gora could be doing with a piece of equipment up here.
The oscilloscope seems perfect, so I hand him the wad of cash, which he counts with great solemnity, and he then calls to the machinists, who swarm around the oscilloscope, packing it carefully and putting it back in its box, taping it over and over again until the cardboard is completely eclipsed in a mountain of tape. They hand me the box and I make my uneasy way down the ladder, through the muddy street and hail a rickshaw to take me and my oscilloscope back to the office.
Just another day in the employ of DWPower.
