Zen and the benefits of motorcycle repair

Abdul Kareem was busy doing the very thing he most disliked about being a school teacher, that is correcting the answer papers of his pupils in the final examination. As the head master of the Municipal High School in the small town of Hoskote, he was not obliged to teach any subject, but he did it anyway to keep in touch with his pupils as a means of knowing what went on in his domain. As he looked out of the window, he could see his friend Manjunath entering the school’s main gate, with a small boy hesitantly following him. Abdul Kareem was somewhat surprised at this unannounced visit of his friend, at his headmaster’s office. Manjunath was the head of the government-run orphanage for the district and was active in the movement to uplift children left behind by the society for no fault of their own. Presently, as Manjunath entered his room with the boy, Abdul Kareem was disturbed to see the boy was sporting a black eye and his hand was in a sling.

After the preliminaries were over, Manjuath came straight to the point of his visit, saying ‘Abdul, this boy here is Joseph, a new boy admitted to our orphanage last week. As you can readily observe, he had been beaten black and blue by the senior boys in the hostel, because he was resisting their efforts to dominate him. When they went physical in anger, Joseph fought with them ferociously, in spite of his small stature. Joseph didn’t want to yield, and by instinct he just could not stand someone dominating him without reason, irrespective of their physical superiority. The results are obvious, as you can see.’ Abdul Kareem was curious, ‘So how are you going to keep him in the same hostel with those bullies? You cannot be watching them all the time’. It gave an opening for Manjunath to make his plea ‘Exactly, Abdul, you got the point of my visit. I feel responsible for this boy, Joseph, and I cannot protect him from the rough crowd in my hostel. That is why I have come to you to request you to take Joseph under your wing in your household for a couple of months, till I make alternate arrangements for him. If he continues in my hostel, I fear for his well-being, and who knows, his life too may be in danger. I will hand over the monthly fee we get from the Department for Joseph’s upkeep to you’. His business promptly concluded Manjunath went off, leaving Joseph in Abdul Kareem’s care.

Not wanting to keep the boy sitting idle in his office, Abdul Kareem gave him the task of cross-checking the totals in the answer papers. After a couple of hours, Abdul Kareem could see that Joseph had neatly bundled the answer papers, after identifying answer papers where the totals were wrong. ‘At least the boy could add’ Abdul thought to himself, as they were preparing to go to their home nearby. Abdul’s wife, Nurunissa, was also a teacher at the same school and their only son, ten-year old Tajuddin, was a student there. When Abdul explained the circumstances of Joseph’s situation at the orphanage, Nurunissa was readily willing to offer him a place at home. Morever, they were pleased to note that Joseph was of the same age as Tajuddin, and they could thus be good company to each other. Within the first few days of Joseph’s arrival in Abdul’s household, he could see that Joseph was a willing participant in the domestic chores, as well as a friendly companion to his son. There was simply no evidence of the violence he displayed against his tormentors back in the orphanage. Abdul concluded therefore that Jospeh was easy to get along, so long as his independent spirit was not offended by bullying behaviour.

On the first Sunday after Joseph’s arrival, Abdul took him to his friend, Rev. Livingstone, the pastor of the Lutheran Church in town. ‘I have brought a new member for your congregation, Reverend. Please make a good Christian out of him’, Abdul introduced Joseph to him. Abdul made sure that though Joseph lived in a traditional Muslim household, he would be exposed to and follow the practices of a good Christian. In time Tajuddin and Joseph became an inseparable duo, helping each other in their studies and games. Joseph became an integral part of the Kareem household, so much so, when after a few months Manjunath came to claim Joseph to be taken back in the orphanage, Abdul Kareem startled himself by revealing his intention to adopt Joseph. Seeing Joseph’s wholesome behaviour as a young boy Nurunissa too was delighted to have Joseph as part of her family.

At school Joseph was ‘just about average’ performer, with middling grades in most subjects; while Tajuddin was making great strides with his academic performance, Joseph was a steady C plus tending towards an occasional B minus. Where Joseph really excelled was in his innate ability to understand things technical and his readiness to get his hands dirty messing around with matters mechanical. In short order he became the go to person whenever his classmates had trouble with their bicycles, or a neighbourhood housewife needed to get her mixie repaired or wherever electrical fuses needed changing. During weekends Joseph could be seen hanging around the local motorcycle mechanic’s shop, helping him in engine tune ups and gear box overhauls. By the time he cleared the school final examination, Joseph was confident of his ability to get in and out of any common domestic appliances, and diagnose and solve technical problems with motor cycles and scooters.

Predictably Tajuddin topped the school in the final examinations, and was automatically selected by a prestigious medical college for education and training as a doctor. Observing Joseph’s average grades, and knowing his technical aptitude, Abdul Kareem knew exactly the appropriate future education option for Joseph. On a working day in May, Kareem accompanied by Joseph, took a bus to Bangalore, to meet his friend the Training and Development manager of a German engineering company. The multinational company had a rigorous technical apprenticeship programme in Bangalore which followed the same lines of engineering training as in Stuttgart, and prided itself in creating hands-on engineering talent well rounded in all aspects of design and manufacturing of precision components. At the training centre, they gave Joseph a test which involved reading a complex technical drawing and assembling a piece of equipment involving several steps, both of which Joseph tackled with calm concentration. Looking at Joseph's native engineering competence the training manager selected him on the spot for their three year apprenticeship programme.

It was at the technical training centre in Bangalore, Joseph was beginning to make a name for himself for his intuitive engineering skills. Gone were the middling grades he was plagued with at school, replaced by top of the class performance in all the subjects among his cohorts. When he unfurled his A3 drawing sheet to reveal a complex drawing with multi dimensional views of an intricate machine part, his instructors could not believe that he did it himself without any assistance. Clean lines, neat lettering and perfect notations were the typical features of a Joseph drawing. Likewise his ability to configure the manufacturing sequence of any complex piece of equipment was without precedence: he could visualise the machining steps involved as well as execute them personally on the machines involved. Very rarely indeed does engineering technical knowledge go hand in hand with the physical aspects of mechanical skills. Translating theoretical knowledge into a tangible output was always the challenge, as many people with an engineering degree would attest. Happily, in Joseph’s case both knowledge and physical ability seem to run on parallel tracks; furthermore they were amplified by his can-do spirit to tackle difficult engineering challenges.

Under normal circumstances Joseph would have finished his training and joined his cohorts in the lower rungs of supervisory jobs in the shop floor. But fate intervened in the form of a trailer carrying a 1970s vintage BMW motorcycle, belonging to Dr Hans Gunther, the Technical Director of the company. The German engineer was a motorcycle enthusiast who brought along his bike from Stuttgart and on weekends he was a familiar sight tackling the picturesquely winding Kanakapura Road to Mysore. Now then, the BMW machine was an iconic piece, with its smooth shaft driven transmission, as opposed to chain driven motorcycles common in India. When Dr Gunther came to the training centre he pointed out the shaft drive mechanism which had broken into pieces and could not be readily replaced in India. ‘Can any of your trainees take a look at this piece and see if we can recreate the shaft mechanism from first principles?’ Gunther asked the head of the training centre pleadingly. ‘Let me see, Sir, what we can do with it’ was the head’s laconic response. As soon as Dr Gunther left the premises, he called Joseph and explained the problem. ‘It is not a simple shaft, Joseph, as you can see universal joints at both ends connecting the engine output shaft and the wheel drive shaft. Whole lot of torque transmission and multi-planer vibration effects have to be reckoned here’.

Joseph took the broken shaft assembly with him to his work desk for a deeper study. He recreated the piece on his drafting board and then transferred it to a CAD programme, so that he now had a multi planer view of the shaft assembly, which he can manipulate for detailed effects of forces and torque variations. He walked over to the metallurgical testing laboratory taking a broken piece of the shaft, to get an exact match for the metal used in its original construction and the heat treatment techniques employed on it. He then went back to the motorcycle itself to study its engine output shaft and how it married with the propeller shaft; he noted down the engine name plate details. He then called up Dr Gunther on the internal line to ask him if he had the motorcycle’s service manual which gave the engine output versus rpm details in graphs; somewhat surprised at this request for he wanted only the shaft to be physically reproduced, Dr Gunther agreed to hand over the manual to Joseph for his study. 

To keep an eye on the progress on his BMW motorcycle, Dr Gunther went into the training centre a couple of days later to meet Joseph. He was expecting only to see some sketchy drawings of the shaft and a general plan to manufacture it as a one-off piece in the tool room. Instead what he saw in the training centre completely bowled him over. Joseph had not only done a neat physical drawing on this drafting board, he had a CAD image on the desk top. He had also taken the engine torque and power curves from the BMW website, and simulated the forces and torques on the propeller shaft when various gears were engaged. Given the metallurgy and stress diagrams, Joseph was able to show under what exact riding circumstances the shaft could crack and break, as had happened earlier. He went even further to show how the fairing dimensions of the shaft could be changed, as well as introducing some flutes instead of the earlier smooth surface finish, would elevate its breaking point to very high levels than before. He produced the final drawings of the drive shaft options, with dimensions, metallurgical specifications, manufacturing sequence and heat treatment procedures. While Joseph was confidently explaining these aspects Dr Hans Gunther was silently admiring the wholesome excellence of Joseph’s neat engineering solution. ‘Man, this wunderkind from rural India could give the engineering lads in Stuttgart a run for their money’ he said to himself. He had a plan silently forming in his mind to make use of Joseph’s prodigious engineering talent.

Within a week, Joseph found himself at a desk in the Technical Director’s office, for he was now the technical assistant to the director. From his perch there he was involved in the technical aspects of many companywide problems, thus getting exposure to the higher ups in the wider German technical fraternity in the company’s headquarters in Stuttgart. With active mentoring from Hans Gunther, Joseph was well on his way to becoming a well rounded world class engineering talent.

When, several months later, Abdul Kareem’s old friend Manjunath came to visit him in Joseph’s house in Bangalore, he could only marvel at the transformation he could see in Joseph. He felt a quiet and personal sense of satisfaction about what his inspired action on that afternoon decades ago had wrought. Genuine talent will out whatever the circumstances, he seemed to think. 

A V Ram Mohan 27th April 2021