B.V.R. Subbu

Rajiv Dube

Imran Hassen

David Friedman

Siddhartha Lal

Everyone has a favourite stretch of tarmac: the place where manufacturer specifications of top speed and braking efficiency can be tested, where the frustration of having to drive to work in bumper-to-bumper traffic can be forgotten, at least for a few tens of minutes, and where there's the road, the car, and the driver, no irritants such as speed breakers, traffic lights, or pedestrians. We asked a collection of auto-men to name their favourite drives. Most had a problem with picking just one but, with some diplomatic prodding by us, that's just what they did.

B.V.R. Subbu, President, Hyundai Motors
This is a man who loves driving, and he claims he has a speeding ticket to prove his love for fast wheels. His favourite piece of tarmac is NH 17, from Mumbai to Goa. And it isn't the destination, but the journey that makes it so.

Aditya Vij, Managing Director, General Motors India
This car man must love his job. His preferred drive is the 33-km long one from Baroda to gm's plant at Halol (it's tolled). And he loves testing his cars on the road from Mumbai to Nashik.

Rajiv Dube, Vice President, Tata Motors
What's it with auto execs and their plants? Dube loves the Mumbai-Pune expressway. Mumbai is where the group's corporate HQ is; Pune hosts the plant. Dube claims that driving down to Pune is faster than taking a commercial flight.

Imran Hassen, Managing Director, Skoda Auto India
The Mumbai-Pune expressway is a favourite of Hassen's. However, he thinks that unless drivers are really sure of their skills they shouldn't drive too fast. Indian roads may look smooth, he warns, but they are not anything to write home about.

David Friedman, Managing Director, Ford India
Friedman doesn't need any prompting to pick his choice; he finds our query ridiculously easy. "Pondicherry-Chennai on the East Coast Road," he says. "Fresh sea breeze and straight over the salt flats-it is a great road."

Siddhartha Lal, CEO, Royal Enfield
As one would expect him to do, Lal loves biking around. When he was in Delhi he would take his Bullet into the hills around Manali. Chennai, where he is based now, doesn't afford him such luxuries. Maybe he should check out East Coast Road. And keep an eye peeled for Friedman in his Mondeo.

-Kushan Mitra

BOOKS
The World As Nemesisto bring about catastrophe.

The ghosts of tomorrow's machines will haunt us tonight more than at any other time. There have always been a few technologically au courant mainstream writers who pick up a thread from contemporary technological R&D and weave a novel around it. Narrow in on the dark side of your technology, and you will not find it difficult to plot human characters of adequate nastiness, venality, or stupidity to bring about catastrophe.

In the mid-nineties, public consciousness fuelled by talk of biological weapons in Iraq and the former Soviet Union was ripe for Richard Preston's non-fiction frightener on deadly agents like the Ebola virus, The Hot Zone (1994). He followed that up with a novel that considered what they could do if not-so-accidental contamination were to take place, The Cobra Event (1997). New York City survives. Just.

More recently, nanotechnology's potential for packing multiple intelligences of a higher order into individual units that would be dwarfed by dust particles has not gone unnoticed by those who wish to give us thrills. Late in 2002, two best-selling authors strutted their stuff. Dean Koontz released By the Light of the Moon. Meanwhile, Michael Crichton, who has been doing this sort of technology-as-perverted-by-bad-people thing more successfully than anyone else since The Andromeda Strain (1969) released Prey. Koontz's book is less explicit, and so possibly less convincing about the technology than is Prey, which in turn is a far less engaging book, largely because as usual Crichton's human characters are only marginally easier to warm to than his technological creations. Yet, both graphically illustrate the unique horrors of nanotech gone awry.

But the truly malign can often assume the most mundane form. Like a database, for instance. The most visible side of this may be your credit card or your mobile phone. The relevant databases may tell anyone who knows where to look a lot more about yourself than you might want communicated.

Lury.gibson, a partnership between writers Adam Lury and Simon Gibson, wrote Dangerous Data three years ago. Readers discovered that there were more than just cellphones and banks to track them by. The scale of data gathering on the individual in the developed world is already huge; on average some 200 companies hold data on an actively employed adult. In a city like London one might typically come across 300 surveillance cameras in a given day.

They also discovered a new kind of private eye. Arthur C. Dogg is a master of cyber tracking. For a steadily rising number of people technology drives almost everything they do. The electronic trails they leave as they shop, travel, or transact say far more about them than any other evidence. In showing us how good Dogg is at tracking people, lury.gibson are merely telling us about about the power of technology that you use-and largely ignore-every day.

With Blood Data, their 2002 follow up, they examine the same pervasive technology in the context of what is your ultimate database, your DNA. As they write, when you bleed, you're downloading data, because your blood carries your genetic code.

Although your genetic code can predict things about you that you don't know yet, it isn't your personal or private data. Someone is storing, retrieving, mining, filtering, and processing this data. Your data. It's really no different from the way they might work on your financial transaction history. And only people like Dogg know how to navigate this weird world where Nemesis is a database.

-Hari Menon

HEALTH NOTES
The Brainworm Bit

There are worms. And then, there are worms. This writer quite liked the worms that appear in cult science-fiction motion pic Dune: enormous, stately, and not at all repulsive. Worms have been in the news recently. There was So. Big, the worm of a different type that caused havoc with computers. And there was the tapeworm that caused neurocysticercosis-call it worm-in-the-brain-syndrome if you will-in Indian tennis ace Leander Paes. Few thoughts are as excruciatingly painful as that of a worm in the head. That understated classic Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan has an alien worm that induces implicit obedience in its hosts when it is inserted into their brains (through the ear).

The tapeworm, Taenia Solium, is pretty common in India. Its tissue-invading larval form (cysticercus cellulosae) is not so common. Ingested, and once it makes its way into the bloodstream, the worm or the larva can go just about anywhere within the human body (anyone seen Innerspace). When the larva stations itself in the brain, it creates a nodule-like structure around itself. This causes headaches, seizures, vomiting and, in some cases, death. The worm itself is far more benign. Most people with worms in their brains do not exhibit these symptoms; nor do they face any kind of health risk. That's when the worm is alive. When it dies, it degenerates, and this creates a lesion. Ergo, if you have a worm in your brain you'd better pray for its continued well-being.

Anyone who has been through a high-school course in biology knows the lifecycle of the tapeworm: pigs to humans to pigs again. But as Dr Mukul Verma, a senior consultant and co-ordinator of the neurology department at Delhi's Indraprastha Apollo Hospital explains, "It is a myth that only non-vegetarians are at risk (from neurocysticercosis); the larvae are passed through unwashed and uncooked vegetables, green chutneys, and salads more than they are passed through pork.''

Doctors suggest that neurocysticercosis can be avoided simply by eating well-washed and well-cooked vegetables, quality pork, and drinking bottled water. And if you have contracted it-symptoms such as seizures, dizziness, and vomiting will follow-a high-resolution scan should be able to detect cysts in the brain. If there are few, the larvae can be killed using albendazole; if your brain is a larvae sweat-shop, doctors are likely to let the body's immune system deal with the problem. "When the drug tackles the cysts, it causes swelling; if there are too many cysts, use of the drug could cause the brain to swell a lot; this might be fatal," says Dr Verma. Talk about a swollen head.

-Ananya Roy

HEALTH SNIPPETS

SLEEP-REDUCTION
Lose weight while you sleep sounds suspiciously like the spam that regularly finds its way into our inboxes. Actually, there's science behind the claim, which revolves around consuming hydrolysed collagen at bed-time (make sure your dinner is at least three to four hours old by then). The collagen strengthens lean muscle tissue and stimulates the burning of fat. Since muscle is heavier than fat that may mean you lose inches before you start losing pounds, but still, you'd be fitter.
(Source: nutritionbreakthroughs.com)

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
Well, you probably knew that already. Here is a quick update
Fish: apart from all other benefits, eating fish can prevent the onset of Alzheimer's
Vitamin C: good not just as a cold-preventive but as a skin protector
High-fat cheese: Not really great for the heart, but can prevent breast cancer in women