are we MAD?

Cycling on a Rickshaw

The first picture that comes to my mind when I hear “cycling” is of Tour-de-France where hundreds of cyclists pedal hard with heads down but only to be beaten by Lance Armstrong. His surname always made me wonder why it is not Legstrong. Now that he has hung his boots and bike, we could see two different people on the podium each year.

What also comes to my head when I hear “cycling” is the face of an Oriya man who took me to school every single day for two years of my life in Raipur. How he huffed and puffed in the heat, while it rained and in the chilling winter. His dhoti and shirt kept him warm and cool according to weather.

I moved to Indore where a bus took me to school and then a motor bike to college. During my graduation years, I took a summer course at IIT Kanpur. My friends from Indore, who had never seen a cycle rickshaw in their lifetime, were more than shocked. The heat in Kanpur was terrible and to sit in a rickshaw, cycled by a man, brought guilt to the kind Jain souls. My dear friends always paid more than what rickshaw wala asked for. Now that I own an imported bicycle with click shift gears, I think why didn’t multiple gears feature where they were needed more? A cycle rickshaw! Where a man ferries 2-3 people relying solely on the strength of his legs, needs to have multiple gears with easy shifters.

I recollect watching a short feature on Doordarshan about a man, who was innovative enough to add gears to cycle rickshaw. This man, Jabbar Shaikh, was watching a rickshaw puller driving in front of his truck and it struck him that he could make the rickshaw puller’s life easier by attaching a gear to it. But he was met with sarcasm and ridicule. Obviously big scientists must have put their thought behind it, and what could this simple mill-worker turned truck-driver achieve!

He left truck driving and bought a cycle-rickshaw with the idea of earning his living from it while trying out his ideas. His two-gear cycle rickshaw was ready in 1989, fifteen years after the idea initially struck him. He certainly is making a difference by changing the perspective towards this environment friendly mode of public transport. Read more about it here.