Roadtrip

Me: This beauty is a 2.4 L ... 2.5 times more powerful than our Zen at home. And it has an amazing 149 HP under its hood!!! 0-60 miles per hour in 7 seconds flat! Imagine !!

Mom: Don't drive unless it is absolutely essential to. Don't drive unless you have someone sitting next to you. Don't take your car to the office unless you really have to stay late.

Mom just could not get it. She simply could not share my enthusiasm over the KIA Optima I had just rented from Hertz. She could not feel the revs as I did and was more worried about the more trivial things in life like safe driving, avoiding the traffic and taking care of your life.

Not that I had a reason to blame her. I have never had a perfect driving record. I was the driver who always came up with a trick or two up the sleeve even when I was driving on a straight and a plain Highway. Like not looking at the speed breaker before a village and going at it at about 70 km per hour. My habit of yelling out "Save yourself!" ten meters before I took a circus-like jump with the car did not help either. I just loved to drive and used to do it a lot of the time. No wonder we did not get a good price when we sold off our vehicle. And no wonder my dad never let me drive the new Zen we bought.

I had my share of life-altering experiences on my bike too. We used to do these Street Hawk like gimmicks where one guy would yell 4-3-2-1-go and the other used to suddenly turn on the throttle and race past the hapless uncles on their scooters. We thought it was incredibly clever and funny. Well, it was funny except for that time when I was Jesse Mach of Street Hawk and was doing about 75 Km per hour when I saw this Buffalo standing right in the middle of the road. By the way, Buffaloes are a morbidly funny bunch of animals. Even though they are mild by nature, they do not obey the traffic rules. And more relevant to the present situation, they do not take collisions with motorbikes in good humor. The polite American "Oh ! Excuse me! Have a good day!" remark when you collide with one (An American I mean...Not a buffalo) is simply not their style of coping with collisions.

So, I did what I had to do, and tried to swerve past the black mass in front of me. I did it quite well except for the fact that the rear wheel of my bike slipped on some pebbles (remnants of a building construction activity) on the side of the road and I did a grand Hrithik-in-KNPH like maneuver. I was lucky that we had not attempted this very far from my place. So, my dear friends did the intelligent thing and carried me home.

God Bless America and God bless Americans on the road.