Achtung!!

And inevitably, I find myself coming back to the topic of cars. I'm simply unable to keep away from it, I'm thinking. Its part of me. Its in my blood, my upbringing. Or whatever other excuse sounds plausible. 

The thing about these days is that nobody has time for their cars. Hardly a surprise, you'd think, given that nobody has time for parents who end up in retirement homes, children, who shoot their friends in school and partners who sleep with the maid or the milkman. And yet, I find, with the cars that my parents entrust me with, saying "okay, this one's yours, and you'll take care of it", they become an obsession. And I think about them all the time. I worry about them, their present and their future. They become my kids. 

People, think of cars as transportation. From A to B. That IS their purpose, there's no getting away from it, but if you look at it, the purpose of coitus is reproduction. And yet we have marriage, and life-long rituals, and a sense of ceremony, and comradeship for life. Not so with cars. Its quite common for them(A-B types) to ignore any untoward noises or lights or anything that might warn them of impending doom. They just drive to wherever they want to get to. And i'm unable to do that. The other day, I had an error warning and I found myself panicking, unable to think about anything else. 

And its where the kind of cars that come along play a role. Korean cars. Cheap cars. Like the Tata No-no. There's a difference between buying cars because you need them, and buying cars because you want them. And it shows in the way they're built as well. More like an appliance. Doubtless, they're always reliable. Ready to go when you want them to. But I don't want to drive something that's been made dispassionately. And that's why, you almost always find you want and buy European. Italian for flair and passion. German for precision. Russian for madness. That's pretty much all there is, anyway, because every other brand's either owned by something Italian or German or American or Russian. And now that the American auto industry has gone tits up, Its pretty much an all-European game. Apart from the Asians. 

And that's where little stickers warning you about the car come into the scene. When you own something that's Korean you normally won't open the hood because you don't care about it, or love it or anything, plus it'll be reliable until the engine finally falls off. And even when you do open the hood, even accidentally, in something that's Korean or Indian or Indo-Japanese or whatever, What do you get? In slightly expensive cars, "Danger! Keep hands away! Fan starts automatically". And in slightly more utilitarian stuff, "Khatra, Hath door rakhiye! Pankha apne aap se chalta hai" The problem with Japanese and other such stuff is that its absolutely indecipherable. 

Mine? "Achtung! Ventilatorlauf jederzeit moglich."

Ooh, yes. I'm in love. I'm sold. I'd pay for and buy a car just to have this inside my hood. I'd open the hood everyday just to look at this strange language and read it and roll it around my tongue. I'm not being elitist here, I've cried when we sold our very Indian Premier Padmini. And loved the Maruti 800. The difference is that it wasn't love at first sight. It was more of an arranged marriage affection sort of thing. Not the I'll-get-this-at-any-cost-look-at-that-sticker kind of arrangement. 

God help the woman who will run my finances.