Friday, January 01, 2010

The Annual Rickshaw Race is underway. Motorized? Cheating.


And to top it off the city they are racing to has a monument of Ghandi. (click here)

Classic Run (from 2009 - click here)


Do you see the cost of the entry fee? Like? What? (click here) And that is in Euros. It translates into about $1900 US. It is an outrage. What happened to the Rupee?



I want divisions here. Motorized and Foot Driven. The guys starting out in Rickshaw or that adhere to tradition don't have a chance. Where are the unions on this? I am serious. The judges have sold out to Wall Street.

There are no purists in the bunch? In India? No purists? Astonishing. It is all that outsourcing that has corrupted their value system.

...This year, 45 participants from 11 countries will be spending New Year's Eve (click title to entry -thank you) on the road to Pondicherry in the first of seven stages of the fourth annual Classic Run Rickshaw Challenge. From Chennai to Kanniyakumari, these participants will experience an autorickshaw adventure that will take 11 days and 1,000 kilometers to complete!

The idea is for every participant to travel to Chennai, learn how to drive an auto rickshaw, and then personally drive their custom-made autorickshaws along a pre-charted route through Tamil Nadu. Participants will be allowed only one break, which will be on New Year's Day to recover from what is anticipated to be an incredible beach party in Pondicherry.

This annual event hold significant importance for its founding company, Chennai Event Management Services. In 2006, founder Aravind Bremanandam introduced autorickshaw expeditions to India in response to the growing trend of adventure tourism. His first route and only route in 2006, an event called the Indian Autorickshaw Challenge, started in Chennai and finished in Kanniyakumari. Today, four years later, that route has been renamed to the Classic Run and three more unique routes have been introduced into the Rickshaw Challenge franchise....