It had been just one week since I had started driving our new Ford Figo and there I was on the Mumbai Pune Expressway doing 80 kmph in fourth gear. I then released the accelerator and pressed the clutch and intended to go in fifth gear, but couldn’t. It was too hard. So I had to continue in fourth gear and then tried again, luckily it worked. Then I thought why was going into fifth gear so hard? The answer was simple. You never really drive in fifth gear (especially in the city) and neither do a majority of level headed people (like myself). Another problem came when I tried going from fifth gear to fourth gear. I was getting the eerie feeling that I was going into reverse gear so I would shift the gear even more to the left from neutral after which the car would lurch and shake and become slow with an uncomfortable jerk. No wonder, because I went to second from fifth. 

I recalled the many nights I kept awake untill the wee hours of the morning watching reviews of Overdrive and the Car and Bike Show when they would say a car was sluggish because it did 0-100 in 15 seconds or so. It all sounds okay in the beginning but later on you realize that you are never even going to drive at 40kmph in city traffic? Maybe that’s why the gear box was so hard.

When I was a small boy I was fascinated with driving (even though we didn’t have a car at the time). I remember sitting on our bed and using a large tub as a steering wheel and making a gear box out of Lego while I mentally recreated the course from home to school while at the same time I would make sounds of a bus from my mouth. These days the movies about cars and driving are partly to blame for rash driving. They give an impression that driving is so easy! (It is not) All you have to do is hop in the driver’s seat and put the 'pedal to the metal' combined with a minimalistic use of something called a brake. TEven, the driving games like Midtown Madness did not help because increasing the speed in that game was a simple question of pressing the up button and if you wanted to go to a higher gear, you had to simply press ‘A’ and to go to a lower gear to press ‘Z’.

I was rightly told that you can never understand the position of a driver until and unless you drive a car (especially in our traffic). The sinking feeling that you feel in the pit of your stomach when you hear the honking of the cars behind you when your car is not starting because you don’t know how much the clutch has to be released to set the car into motion (and with a green light ahead of you) has to be experienced to be understood. The nervousness that you feel when a taxi, car or bike overtakes you while keeping a margin of error of only a few inches is unexplainable.

So when my father told me that we would drive to Pune it was no wonder that I was feeling unprepared. And unprepared I was. My car must have shut down a dozen times in the stretch between my father’s office in Mazgaon to the starting of the highway. I was also stuck on a traffic signal which was at a small incline for about 5 minutes during which time the car would roll back after each unsuccessful attempt to go ahead during which a policeman asked me to produce my license and asked me if I could drive or not. An unenviable position surely. I finally heaved a huge sigh of relief when after what seemed like an eternity I got the position of the clutch right and moved the car ahead, because if I hadn’t we would have surely rammed into the truck which was hardly a few centimeters behind us. Something as easy as starting a car can be a Herculean task when you have fifty odd angry drivers honking their heads off behind you. It was during all of those moments when I regretted having shouting matches with my sister and father when the car would shut down when they were driving.     

Another thing which makes driving in the city hell is the pedestrians. Our country is going through an economic boom and every Ramesh, Mahesh and Suresh has a cell phone and they are always talking. Even while crossing the street! (Effects of the 'Walk and Talk' commercials) If you spend a lot of your time on the phone, it is beneficial for your health if you walk while you talk, but talking while crossing the street or at a busy intersection while not looking at the traffic can be life threatening. When you see a person coming off the footpath your heart does skip a beat and you must immediately press the clutch and remove the foot from the accelerator and place it on the brake ready to stop the car at a moment’s notice.

It is also on some of these tense occasions when you wonder why in the world the government spends so much money on making footpaths when people don’t want to use them? While coming back from Pune I had drove on the stretch after the Ghats and was feeling very confident (it was a straight road from there on) and was touching speeds of 100 ( I was still having problems with the fifth gear). Beginners must actually never drive on highways because it spoils you. It makes you feel that Indian drivers have good driving manners (which sometimes is true). So when I left the Expressway and entered the city, it was like entering a storm infested place. The calm and organized manner of driving on the Expressway gave way to a frenzy of drivers who have the hangover of driving on the Expressway and drove at speeds of 80 in narrow streets (we Indians are always in a hurry).

I was pushed into the right most lane of the road which is usually the lane which the fast drivers use and it was there that the tension, adrenaline and inadequateness reached it’s peak. When cars and bikes honk and overtake you and then turn back and look at you thinking what’s wrong with you (I was going slow at the time) you have the uncomfortable urge of just letting go of the steering wheel and giving up. Luckily, my father said he would take it from there and drove till we reached home. While driving that day, there was one phrase which was in the fore in my mind – 'Baptism by fire' and I guess driving in the streets of Mumbai makes you as they say, 'Get a Graduation degree without going through Matriculation.' I have a lot of learning to do but I know I will make it.