Confluence of the Dark Knights...and...er..a white one...

Upon discovery of the degree confluence project (http://www.confluence.org/) I instantly knew that we, the SQF (Sinhgad Quizzing Fraternity) brethren were the right people for the job. I tossed the idea to the real life Calvin manifestation a.k.a. Anish and he jumped at the thought. Panday as is usually the case, volunteered lazily. White chocolate a.k.a. Rahul was a hard (and white) nut to crack. But he agreed to come after he realized that his lame excuses were futile against me. Now the problem was finding a GPS device. Like a saviour emerged Ashish Chaudhary. He had a device which he got from those NRI-relatives. Bless them. So we were set. Day-Sunday. Time-afternoon. Car-maruti 800. Punctuality-none. After setting off 45 mins late, we filled petrol and were off. Rahul (who henceforth will be referred to as ‘the tourist’ for reasons which would soon be obvious) was given a pizza. (which was nothing more than a 'bling-bling' papad) After the mustard sauce settled (all over the rear seat…..much to my distraught when I later realized that) we were out of Pune heading due south. This trip fulfilled my dream of riding a moon-buggy on the lunar surface. Well it almost did. Except that the moon buggy was the maruti and moonscape was the highway. After proving that maruti does make some of the best suspension systems in the world, we closed in our objective. Just before khambatki ghat, our GPS unit read that we had already crossed our confluence point!! (18N 74E) But we trusted Google Earth and NASA World Wind (whose maps we were using) more and decided to cross the ghat. The satellites put some sense back into our device which then read as expected. Just below that ghat, it started pointing to a point some 400m into a field. We parked our car and ventured into the lush green albeit shady looking field. Three fields, four weird looking cows and two snaps later we saw some form of habitation. They were farmers working in the fields. One of them saw us from a distance and started yelling in a vernacular tone, “Come here.” We weren’t surprised to hear a farmer speak English. We were wondering why he chose us to display his knowledge of the language. Then as is generally the case, we realized that he must have thought that Rahul was a foreigner! And indeed, when he approached him trying to explain what we were doing, he said he thought we were foreigners, because of Rahul. He apparently was a part time farmer working forBPCL in Wai, close by. He directed us around the field and after a few minutes of walking and crawling with the device, we finally successfully located 18.00.00 N and 74.00.00 E. I think it was the Sun in India that made the tourist loose his senses when he loudly proclaimed that the sun sets in the east. In his wid fit of mental imbalance he manged to loose our only pen. After a hearty laugh the required snaps were taken and we walked back to our car. On the way back, in continuation of his bad day, the tourist stepped in slush which he later had to clean with cow fodder. All this when we met the mobile phone brandishing sarpanch of the village. We reached Pune two and a half hours later.
So all in all it was more of a confluence of carefree road tripping and funny Rahul-related incidents rather than just a confluence of integer latitudes and longitudes.