ARHS

ARHS is the abbreviation for Amplified Reverse Honking System that I am proposing for modern day Indian traffic.

Objective
As Indians, amongst of the varied things that we enjoy doing in our roads, like, Sighting, Shouting, Stunting, Spitting, Pissing, all of us enjoy this thoroughly – Honking. This proposed system is to make the best use of Honking for the Honkers, The Honked and the rest.

Design
1. An indigenously built device will be embedded in to the steering wheel (or somewhere near) of every car, truck, buses, autos, share autos, call taxis
2. The device will have multi-frequency sound emitter, amplifier, some processing logic components, GPS integration.
3. The device main purpose is to detect if the driver just honked – if true, emit at least (2-n)X of the same sound (why same sound is explained later) inside the automobile, aimed at both the ears of the driver. I call this sound as “Honk of the Monk (HOM)”. This also sounds similar to pom (of pom-pom, aka horn)

What follows below is the detailed requirement and logic based on which the sound emitted will differ dynamically according to external stimulated factors, past history and the Indian ways of doing things.

1. The device is actually an AI (will take help of James Cameron) and has got a self learning / adapting system. Every honk by the driver along with other parameters like place of honking (using GPS), time, traffic density, distance from the signal / crossing / junction, type of road (heavy traffic, highway) will be recorded by the device
2. If the driver honks during busy traffic hours (7AM – 11AM and 5PM – 10PM) then a sharp HOM at 3X will be emitted from the device. During busy traffic hours, it is expected that the traffic movement would be slower and the driver is expected to know this common sense
3. Similarly the device keeps track of the vehicle movement (GPS) and if the vehicle is in areas like “Madhya Kailash”, “Vadapalani”, “Koyambedu Jn”, etc where traffic jams are expected anytime then same logic as above would apply
4. There is a monthly max limit of honking that is allowed beyond which the device starts working on alternate routes, such as
a. Starts monitoring the blood pressure and other vital params of the driver and says “If you honk again, you will hear a 4X HOM which is very very different from all the ones you have heard before. This noise can instantly boost up your BP to higher levels there by increasing your chances of finding answers for your life such as where you will go after this life?”
b. The device will keep changing the FM station making the driver to listen to only Advt.
c. When the driver is engaged in some conversation with co-passengers it would start answering automatically like “yes, oh noo, no-no-no,mmmhmmmm,abs-f#$king-lutely, etc”. This is the Natural Language Processing ability of the device – will use some Google Engineers for this
5. The device acts more like the God’s books – you can negate your wrong doings by doing some right things. If you do not honk for a day, it would automatically cut down one of your honking entry
6. As a bonus-goodwill feature, if the driver didn’t honk for quite some good amount of time then a registration number appears in the driver’s dashboard. This number is the nearest, next available driver who is the notorious-top-honker. The good driver has the option of going in front of that driver’s car, pissing him off and making him hear that HOM. The onboard device will help in navigating to that vehicle. On successful pissing off the other driver, the same can be updated as status message in FaceBook.
7. The device syncs up the data real time with its distributed server and the data gets replicated in real time for multiple backup and availability. We will use Nandan Nilekani to design such a huge backend system. The data would also be tied to the UID system.
8. The tying-to-UID can help in getting through people who change cars and think they can get rid of their past. Next car will be imported with all the past data.

Some part of the code will be released as API, on top of which users can build FaceBook apps. Extensions can be built where the device can start abusing the driver in the driver’s own language

Now, on why the same sound but amplified version is emitted from the device? Some of these crazy people have these “dog-clearing-its-throat” kind of sound kept as their horn. They should definitely hear it how irritating it is for others.

I am also in the process of designing something similar for motorcycles / bikes especially the TVS-XL / M80 sounds. There is a design complexity where the vehicle is actually not an enclosed one.