I(t) went down like this..
Was comin home from R.T.Nagar in the evening around 6:30. It was dark but not stormy. Not enough of a cliche? Sorry, but I cant help ya there. I bring you the facts, the truth, even if you cant handle it. I was being extra cautious with the bike that day. That's coz the tyres were visibly misaligned. The result of a previous crash coupled with shoddy repair work. The problem had been escalating for two months only to be noticed by me on the morning of a holiday. [Another day, another festival] So I couldn't get it fixed, but I really needed the bike. So I decided to be very cautious all through that day. And I was, for the 20-odd kms I rode before the crash. Anyway, there was a conscientious gentleman driving some Maruti ahead of me. He didn't want to hurt the dog that teleported right in front of his car, so he hit his brakes. So did I, even though I was at a safe distance. He didn't skid. I did. Scraped both my knees and got bruises on both my hands. So I've been very uncomfortable this past week. So, that's the thing. My tyre alignment problem seemed like the only logical connect left between me braking and falling.. But was it?
Here's the first viewpoint. Fact: About 15 minutes before the crash, I was talking to a friend of mine about atheism, agnosticism and how people responded to non-believers. See, I'd recently realised that atheists are treated differently by lots of people for no reason other than their beliefs. At first, the probable number of people who behaved this way was surprising. But it didn't take too long for it to make some sense. But while I realized what this sort of behaviour explained [the holocaust and religious wars and stuff] , I still don't know what explains it. Anyway, the other fact required for this viewpoint is that I've always said that if I see proof of miracles, god, the Invisible Pink Unicorn [IPU] or the Flying Spaghetti Monster [FSM], I'd promptly turn into a believer.
So maybe this was it. This was probably Her Holy Pinkness trying to give me a sign. 15 minutes after a discussion about atheism, I crash. It can be taken to be a punishment too. Either way, it's a valid way of looking at the thing. And it also shows that miracles take atleast 15 minutes to happen.
Second viewpoint then, just as valid as the first. A day before the crash, I was talking to another friend of mine. [Yes, I have more than one friend] The topic here was my bike itself. Here's what I typed in:
"My bike hasn't been the same recently. It's dying.. I have to let it go. Besides so many new and awesome bikes have been announced recently that I feel encouraged to move on.
"Now my bike is a proud one. It thinks it's definitely male.and it believes that its muscular form is the result of hours of working out. Heck even I hold pride in its ability to smoke over 90% of the bikes on Bangalore roads in a drag. [Don't believe me? Don't know that 90% of bikes in India are either not in the performance segment at all, or are 150cc, 14 bhp bikes which I can beat?] So, my proud bike, when it heard me typing those words, took offense and decided to take its captain down with itself. Only it doesn't realise, it's not a ship. Ships are female. And my bike is gender neutral.
Third time then. I'll stop after this, don't leave. A month and a half before the crash, I had had another one [Was hit sideways by a speeding tractor - nothing major for me, the bike's swing-arm though, was bent]. Now this followed my giving the bike to a service center for repairs. They didn't do a very good job. The bend wasn't completely removed. It started getting worse over time and by the time I found out about it, the rear tyre was pointing in a wrong way. And by the time I was done crashing, the swing-arm was bent to quite an extent. It's at a lathe right now. Getting that bend out.
Now let's consider all these three theories and try to evaluate each theory's accuracy.
But first, let's take the assumptions. The ones everyone knows and most people accept go first in each instance:
* God knows all, sees all,... Omniscience, right? Fine.
* My bike can hear everything I type.
* God is just and fair. God punishes you only if you've wronged him.
* My bike is just and fair and tries to kill me only if I've wronged it.
* God does allow some innocent people to get hurt though, but that can be excused by those people's past lives or something.
* I have crashes even otherwise, but that can be excused by carelessness of the other driver or something.
* [this one might be a little hard to digest] When people on their bikes hit the rear brake harder than the front brake, the bike tends to skid, especially if the rear tyre is already tilted to one side.
[Hajmola, anyone?]
In cause-effect relationships, the most often seen case is such.. The most recent cause is accredited the status of primary cause. And the other suspects, if I may, are either discarded completely or just not bothered about as much. So, the primary case is the first one I presented, as the apparent cause in it happened the most recently. Pretty valid a theory even this statement was, no?
Thus the existence of the FSM is proved.
N.B. I was going at 50kmph (max) before I hit the brakes.
