Driving Mad

Given a choice of which vehicle I would want to drive the most, ten times out of ten, I would pick the truck. And no, I would not go for the itsy-bitsy Tata Ace kinds or the sorry-ass soapboxish SUV like things the Americans call trucks or even those pathetic 9-ton lorry things. NO SIR, you can have your ‘last mile connectivity’ and roll weed in it and dip it rabbit’s urine and pray that smoking it will grant you the sagacity of Our Dear Leader. Not for me any of this pansy nonsense.  When I say truck, I mean TRUCK. I want a large 20 ton truck or one of those mammoth container transports or, even better, one of those car transport things.

My reasons are simple. The romance of lugging a mammoth beast thousands of kilometers around the country, night after night, going smoothly on well laid highways watching the beautiful rolling vistas of our hinterland rollingly vist by me in the pale moonlight of the night; hearing nothing but the roar of the engine and swish of tyre on asphalt; and the glorious joy of the lilting voices of Bhojpuri and Haryanvi singers wanting to explore delicately the tender parts of their beloved and seeking to burn themselves in the fires of love emanating from her short skirt; and the occasional friendly exploration of the genealogy of a colleague over a wrong-sided overtake…No, not really.

I think it is time to let it out now. I do not drive. I mean that in the sense I cannot tell that of those three pedal-like things on the driving side floor of the car, which one makes the car go faster, which one slows it down, and which one makes it go out of its mind like a Nana Patekar dancing with Malaika Arora Khan. In addition, I am very very scared of the possibility of damaging my car in the way that I am afraid of being the one careless owner of the car Douglas Adams said had three very careful owners and one recklessly careless one. And last, but not the least, I am patently terrified by the utter irrationality of driving a car in face of the fact that given the speeds people drive at there is a very good chance that a lot of cars could, at any given point in time, be occupying the same geographical and temporal space. As that is rationally impossible, and yet, seems to happen with an alarming frequency, I choose not to drive. Also, I do not drive sounds a hell of a lot better than I do not know how to drive when you are thirty years old. All of which should probably explain a lot about why I want to drive a truck and not some itsy bitsy thing.

There are other reasons. Truck drivers do not have to worry about other people breaking traffic rules around them. In fact, you will find that drivers of pesky little vehicles like cars and SUVs, who are normally as arrogant as Shahrukh Khan at a Wankhede Stadium, suddenly hide their tails between their legs and keep at their best behavior whenever a truck is around, much like a truant student around the headmaster.

Another thing about traffic laws and rules and etiquettes. The Indian populace accords the same importance to traffic laws and etiquette that it does to intellectual property rights. That is, we as a people do not acknowledge the existence of such things. But let us see you misbehave or overtake a truck from the wrong side, you!

Another reason- how you drive when a truck is around in the lane next to you is a measure of the kind of man you are. I mean I am not particularly a coward, but let me tell you this: I once had the good fortune of being driven on the Mumbai-Pune expressway by a colleague, and we did a stretch where we drove for almost a kilometer with a truck on either side. I am telling you boss, my balls were trying to seek asylum somewhere in the vicinity of my liver. I would happily choose an evening with Kareena Kapoor over a repeat of that experience, anyday. Imagine, OTOH, had I been one of the truck drivers at that particular moment. Just the very thought makes a warm glow go through my insides.

 And I see a kind of romance in truck accidents. Let us take a trailor which has jack-knifed on the expressway. Goodluck trying to find your way out of that jam. I call it a way of getting back at the world- my day is ruined, why should yours' be any better? You call it a damn nuisance, boss. I call it poetic justice!

Which is why I say: Let us all drive trucks.