Thursday, July 2, 2009

A challenging drive home.

You've just bought a new car. You take delivery, and you drive from Whitefield to Malleswaram. The car is not even registered. You've driven for close to 10 years. I'd say thats enough experience to manage the drive home without grounded chassis, scrapes, dents or scratches. 

Yet, you want to leave as much distance as you can from the next vehicle. Only, we know thats not possible, coz whenever you get a new car, a standard feature that you get with the car is a magnetic force, attracting everything from cycles, to busses to beggars that start getting too close for comfort. You want to leave distance in the front but you cant, coz the dick heads at the back start honking. You cant drive fast and leave those dick heads behind coz  you'll be rude to the L board driver in front of you by honking yourself. 

To make matters worse we're driving in Bangalore right. At 7 pm. Peak hours. Everyones dying to get past you. So they can beat their earlier record of 57 minutes. "Oh man I did Whitefield to MG Road in 63 minutes... Beat that". 

Lets not forget about those wonderful craters, AKA pot holes in the road that bikers absolutely love. It gives them reason to actually cut lanes without warning.  

You on the other hand are actually scared to break hard when these pot holes magically appear outta nowhere. You fear that if you break too hard, a dick head on three wheels is going to ram his front wheel up your ass. So what choice are you left with? Just drive over the pot holes at 60 kmph and hope that Maruti actually threw in a good suspension (in addition to the standard magnetic force feature). 

Your next challenge is to make sure that you dont ground your chassis on on one of those millions of speed humps. You're virtually driving at 5 kmph and somehow someone finds the need to spend our taxes on getting those speed humps placed. Still, I feel thats money being put to good use. It's better than digging up and mending a road for the 256th time in 3 months.

To top it all, it rains. And when it Rains in Bangalore, your new shiny black swift, gets slathered with mud (and spit). You can blame the standard magnetic force for this. 

You finally drive home a new shiny car that looks like its just been in a rally. Its covered in mud, got a couple of spit marks on the bumper and a few lumps of dung stuck to the wheels. And did you know that the warranty is void the minute you use the car in a rally? How heartening.

You finally get home with a car that looks a year old. You park, trying to make sure its in a spot thats least likely to be in the way. You don't want someone else bumping your car on the first day when they're parking right? So you find a nice secluded corner under a tree. You then retire for the night in peace. 

The next morning, you see crow shit on the handle of the door. The standard magnetic force feature hasn't worn off yet.