Saturday, August 26, 2006

Alternative Transport

(Budget available - 60k)

Pros of buying a well trained Asian Elephant to take me to office -

1)Id be helping conserve the asian elephant

2)Id be totally *environment friendly*

3)Id save on the petrol thereby indirectly helping our Balance of Payments situation (wow ! Patriotic!)

4)If tuk tuk drivers try to say things to me I can gently instruct the Elephant to pick them up and place them in the nearest canal. or on a roof top.Carefully and courteously mind you.

5)I wouldnt have to worry about getting run over by maniac 138 buses . I can tell my charge to sit on them for a while and hopelessly delay them if they are rude to me.

Cons :

  • it would take me 1 hour to get to work at the lesuirdly pace taken by local pachyderms and if there are females in the nearby temples there may be what perhaps can be called "diplomatic incidents"(=further delay)
  • and there is one little problem at my Flower Road office - parking.

I guess thats why I had to settle for a moped.Dang!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

well conservation wouldn't really apply unless you had a few elephants and were willing to take the time to let em get jiggy, then spend money and time getting the babes back into the wood so to speak (sorry environmental scientist speaking).

Also one problem you forgot, gigantic amounts of crap.

Anonymous said...

perhaps you could add the following to the pros list:

* you mix a pint of bleach, some perfume and dirty ink to a kiogramme of elephant dung. you put the mess between two sheets of plywood and make the elephant sit on it. the next day, you go to Barefoot and sell it for 4000 rupees per metre as 'Cutely Native Elephant Paper'. using takarang sheets, you can call it 'special corrugated recycled paper' and make about twice that.

* if they refuse to bite, you can always follow the lead of the indians and save up on gas-cooker bills. in fact, if the prices of fuel keep ascending at the current giddy pace, you'll probably save more than a metre of the special corrugared recycled paper would get you.

* its perfectly legal to own an elephant in a city, so theres nothing the neighbors can do about it. after roughly a week of putting up and turning their noses away, they take turns to wash it.

* its a slightly harder to steal than a moped, and if it gets lost, people go to great pains to return it to you from wherever its eating and sleeping now.

* when those horrible leyland buses hoot their horrible horns at you, you can train it to turn around and give bugger all right at the sod's windshield.

* at the rate the municipality keeps cutting down trees, you never have to go very far for fodder.

i speak from experience. in the good old days before the symbol of a pachyderm gained such widespread unpopularity in sri lanka, i owned a leaf-and-poonac-engined five tonner myself. in cognizance of the present-day reaction of the populace to elephants in general, i now float to work on magic betel-leaf.

aljuhara said...

Elephant owner of late - I salute you!Just thinking about the daily crap cleaning excersise I used to have with 3 alsations , I can imagine what it must have been like. Plus by any chance did you have banana trees which bore humongous fruits ??Meanwhile ,now that no one is buying my moped Im wondering if I can actually ask someone to steal it and then claim the insurance money. ah tis sad, the desperate levels to which I have sunk....
Hey wait a minute ,did I say sunk?nah, I was always lower middle class ,methinks,its just getting a bit lower thats all...

and C025, what woods? first we goina have to conserve *them*. alternatively maybe we can just get their DNA stored so that when sri Lanka is civilised (maybe 3015 AD) we can bring them back and itll be jurasic park again but Elephants only and we can have kadala and pineapple slices while off roading thru it...
...wishful thinkin..
:-)
loved reading your comments!thanx!

Chamendra Wimalasena said...

Parking?!?!? you get parking in flower road! bugger.. i live near there and i don't get parking also.. BUT.. any way if you want to park your elephant. then maybe you can send the bugger to sathutu uyana.. perhaps the govt will arrange that bloomin waste of space for animal parking.. oh wait this means all the couples who're doin it are going to have to move as well.. since galle face is a total f up.. hmmm.. wonder where the govt will give space for these activities :) lol :) ahhh.. my mind is a muck.. i hate french exams.. if only it were in english :(