The love affair with cars

My love affair with cars goes a long way back, right into my childhood.  Some of the old-timers in my family, a few of my surviving uncles and aunts, swear to a rather, funny story that when I was a young boy, perhaps, 6 or 7 years old, fervently pleading with my dad to drive home the cars that were parked on the road-side, when the owners of these cars were not around!  I was told that my dad had slyly remarked that since we do not have a garage at home, where do we park those cars.  Lucky for me that, in later years, I didn’t end up being a car thief and locked away for good!  Another of the family secret is out.

It was the early eighties.  We had no inkling that a car revolution was just around the corner.  The Ambassadors and Fiats (later Premier Padmini) were on the verge of disappearing into oblivion.  As a fresh recruit at the Head Office of our Bank, we young employees were awe-struck to watch the spectacle of the Bank’s senior management (or executives as they were commonly referred in my Bank), arrive in their Ambassador or Fiat cars and walk up the few steps at the entrance of the Head Office to reach their respective Offices or Departments on different floors of the Head Office building wherever it is they worked.  These senior gentlemen started arriving, one after the other, as if on cue, in a space of few minutes just before the clock struck 10’o clock (the Bank’s start time). The liveried drivers opened the rear door of their cars for these gentlemen and carried an assortment of files, hurrying after them.  This parade of the senior management arriving in their Ambassador or Fiat cars was a great spectacle to us young employees (we were in our early twenties then); we stood aside respectfully near the stairs or the entrance of the elevator mutely watching after them with some sort of reverence.  A few of the fresh recruits, who were slightly brazen enough, threw in a smile and Good Morning salute at them, while some of the timid ones like me, hurried furtively behind the top executives, avoiding their eye.   After the executive had vanished inside the building,  some of us looked pensively at the cars in which they had just arrived.  The cars, freshly washed and cleaned, gleamed in the sunlight; would be parallel parked and lined up as if in a fashion show, in the ample parking space by their respective drivers.

The executive cadre was considered a creamy layer in the Bank hierarchy because each position carried with it many perks and powers.  The allotment of a car was the foremost perk that attracted us, the younger Bank recruits.  The highest aspirations of the younger lot of us recruits those days were measured in terms of being provided a car by the Bank along with a liveried driver.   The lure of the Ambassador or Fiat car as a perk drove some of my colleagues to seriously think of taking up the tough promotion tests for getting promotions to higher cadres.  There was also a mad rush (considered premium posting) for getting a transfer to such of those branches which had a Bank car attached to it.   These cars were considered branch property and the senior most Manager or Senior/Chief  Manager was most likely to use it as his personal vehicle!

I remember a time, when the Bank’s Chairman & Managing Director had been provided with a Contessa sedan for his personal use.  Some of us youngsters, had rushed out in the middle of our office work with other like minded crazy colleagues from our work places, just to look at this car and feast our eyes on the new offering from Hindustan Motors. We were just used to watching with wide-eyed wonder, a Rolls Royce or some fancy, glitzy Italian sports car in glossy magazines or newspaper posters.  Not in real life, mind you!  The sight of a Contessa sedan in real life, right in front of us, was considered, indeed, our good fortune.  Anyway, for Hindustan Motors, the Contessa sedan was not a success, and it bombed badly at the car box-office!

Alas, my biggest aspiration of those days, to drive a Bank car, remain unfulfilled!  I was never promoted to the Bank Executive position.  That's a story for a different context and, perhaps, a different timeline.  Nevertheless, my love affair with the cars had ended, rather sadly, not unlike our story of Contessa from Hindustan Motors!

Even if, perchance, some dumb-minded benevolent philanthropist was to offer me a Ferrari or a Porsche now, I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near it!  I am writing this piece, read posthumously, as my love affair with cars has long ended, rather prematurely, don't you think! I am still very much alive and kicking.

P.S:  Tell me, who in his right mind, would like to drive a car in this crazy Bengaluru traffic?