Ode to driving and its teacher

I had a one hour + long drive to work today dropping S at work in Santa Cruz and me at Borivali. As I was driving today, I realized how relaxing it is to have some music playing while cruising through potholes, wrongly named as roads, in Mumbai.

I was maneuvering through the rough and smooth and thoughts drifted to dad and his driving. To me, he is the hero, the best driver I have ever seen. Totally in control of the vehicle and knows what’s best for the car. He is an awful teacher though and has made me cry and panic on several occasions while teaching me to drive... But then which dad hasn’t... :-)
He would sit next to me in the car. And right from the time I turn on the ignition of the car, his string of issues start. I am driving too close to the pavement or I am not controlling the steering wheel properly, the vehicle is swerving, I am not applying brakes on time or I am on the wrong gear. I am not looking at the traffic behind before changing lanes or taking a turn or I am not going slowly enough over speed breakers and potholes... The list is endless.
I used to secretly wait for him to go on official trips out of station when I could slyly take the car to college. Of course mum, being my partner-in-crime and all that. But at the end of it, I, not only, learnt how to drive the car, but also know how to handle it best during the drive, the road sense, the traffic sense and everything. Mum, now, thinks I drive just like dad and that sure gives me a sense of pride... :-)

Dad is most short tempered on the road. If he sees anyone doing anything wrong, he'd slow down, make sure the cyclist or the pedestrian or the truckwalla or whoever gets to listen to his piece of mind loud and clear, no matter whatever hurry he is in. His gaalis are also quite funny. If a cyclist miscalculates and just brushes past the car, dad would exclaim, "Ghar mein bolke aaya kya?" (Translate that to tamil while in Chennai, Hindi in Delhi, Mumbai etc). Now this is a very common swearing in tamil which essentially means, that you are deliberately wanting to come under my car since you've informed home that you are gonna die today. But to a Delhi-walla, he wouldn’t quite understand what the fuss is about. “Ghar mein kya bolke ayenge?” one would wistfully wonder while dad would have finished and sped off miles. Another of his gem is to this 'huge' family of sardars, consisting of Banta Singh, his grossly overweight wife Mrs Banta Singh, their 10 year old son and some month’s old daughter who’d all be travelling in a luna-type vehicle. Obviously Mr. Banta would find it very difficult to balance his luna perfectly with the center of gravity getting displaced due to the humongous mass of flesh, Mrs. Banta Singh, riding as pillion. So while struggling to get his physics in place on the road, he'd have already attracted dad's attention. Promptly dad would scream out, "Kyon? Hum Saath saath hain?". And that would have all of us in splits including dad. Mr. Banta would be too busy to notice but we've all had a great laugh..:-)

Dad also has this most amazing way of listening to music on the road. And if they started playing Shankar-Jaikishen or Madan Mohan and such, he'd be totally tickled. He'd not only start singing the song out (which is ok, he has a good voice and sings rather well if you chose to ignore the heavy tam accent and distorted hindi). He'd then start honking to the beats of the song, totally confusing the guy behind the wheel in front of us.

As I was listening to music in the car today, I couldn’t help but realize, I have imbibed this too from him. I seem to sing out loud in the car with fingers tapping all over the steering wheel. Only thing I refrain from is probably, honking to the rhythm.
Who knows, maybe I'd start that too soon... After all hum bhi saath saath hain... :-)