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One late night in February 2000, I found myself walking home from my workplace...those days I was collaborating with an MIT Prof, Edwin F Taylor, who was a lark while I was an owl. So the 10.5 hours lag in our local times suited both of us.
As I was half way down Road # 5 at IIT KGP, it started drizzling and then pouring as it does in KGP without any warning and I was stuck beneath a tree which didn't much help.
It was then that it struck me like a thunderbolt that life without a car wasn't worth living. And I recalled a similar moment under a similar tree a couple of decades back then when a similar thunderbolt hit me saying life without a wife wasn't worth living, at age 36...and I had taken urgent steps:
"Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth the favour of the Lord"
...Solomon, King James Bible
So I called my friend NP who knows all about gadgets and gizmos and asked him to please get me a new cheap car available in the market. And he said what suits me to a tee was a Maruti 800.
Then he rang up the biggest showroom in Calcutta and downloaded all the colors of Maruti 800 on their menu with fancy names like Caribbean Blue, Icy Blue, Silky Silver and a dozen others. We sat together for a couple of hours and decided that we better see them in the showroom before we select...for by then we were old enough not to trust the advertised color of a car or a bride.
When we were nearing the showroom a week later, I was dreaming that this vast showroom at the biggest outlet in Calcutta would be stacked with all sorts of Maruti 800s for us to go, touch, feel, and then buy...like in a Matrimela.
But alas it turned out to be like all my dreams of brides and cars...the bewitching sales girl there was all hooha welcoming two graying professors of the only IIT in Bengal. But said there was only one piece of Maruti 800 available at the moment (whatever that moment was) and asked us to take it before it flies off the shelf. And I shyly asked her what she calls its color and she said:
"Why! It is Cypress Blue Metallic, you know...the hottest and sweetest"
Sigh!
PS: The other day I took that 15-year-old Maruti of mine to Taj Motors here in Hyderabad for changing its alternator. And after charging me all of Rs 5000, my Maruti Doc, Alam Bhai, asked me what the color of my old jalopy is called. And I said:
"Cypress Blue Metallic"
"Oh, it looks so better than new!"
...Vox Doc, Vox Dei!
...Posted by Ishani
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One late night in February 2000, I found myself walking home from my workplace...those days I was collaborating with an MIT Prof, Edwin F Taylor, who was a lark while I was an owl. So the 10.5 hours lag in our local times suited both of us.
As I was half way down Road # 5 at IIT KGP, it started drizzling and then pouring as it does in KGP without any warning and I was stuck beneath a tree which didn't much help.
It was then that it struck me like a thunderbolt that life without a car wasn't worth living. And I recalled a similar moment under a similar tree a couple of decades back then when a similar thunderbolt hit me saying life without a wife wasn't worth living, at age 36...and I had taken urgent steps:
"Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth the favour of the Lord"
...Solomon, King James Bible
So I called my friend NP who knows all about gadgets and gizmos and asked him to please get me a new cheap car available in the market. And he said what suits me to a tee was a Maruti 800.
Then he rang up the biggest showroom in Calcutta and downloaded all the colors of Maruti 800 on their menu with fancy names like Caribbean Blue, Icy Blue, Silky Silver and a dozen others. We sat together for a couple of hours and decided that we better see them in the showroom before we select...for by then we were old enough not to trust the advertised color of a car or a bride.
When we were nearing the showroom a week later, I was dreaming that this vast showroom at the biggest outlet in Calcutta would be stacked with all sorts of Maruti 800s for us to go, touch, feel, and then buy...like in a Matrimela.
But alas it turned out to be like all my dreams of brides and cars...the bewitching sales girl there was all hooha welcoming two graying professors of the only IIT in Bengal. But said there was only one piece of Maruti 800 available at the moment (whatever that moment was) and asked us to take it before it flies off the shelf. And I shyly asked her what she calls its color and she said:
"Why! It is Cypress Blue Metallic, you know...the hottest and sweetest"
The name sounded so exotic that we decided to buy it on the spot, paying Rs 5000 extra for the Metallic part of the name, whatever it was....apart from that it was a Hobson's Choice.
When Amal saw it parked beneath the banyan tree at the back of the Physics Department and came to know that I was the latest Cypress Blue Goat in the Campus, the earlier ones being Timir and Satish, he asked me how many months I waited for this model to arrive in Calcutta. And I said:
"2 minutes"
He then told me he had booked his Maruti 800 from the same Calcutta outlet 6 months back and was waiting for his choice of color to arrive. I asked him what was that dream-color and he replied:
"California Gold"
And when pressed why, he replied that it was all about astrology...his model arrived 6 months later in the campus.
When one of those days I ventured driving to the KGP railway station to pick up a friend from Calcutta, I found a lady colleague stranded in the station since it was raining hard in a blowing wind. And I offered chivalrously to take her in my new Maruti and drop her at her Qrs. And I was praising her daughter who was my favorite student a few years back and was by then in the US.
After she got down and was thanking me for the ride, I asked her how the ride was...
And she said:
"The drive was good but the color of the car is a bit gaudy, no!"
PS: The other day I took that 15-year-old Maruti of mine to Taj Motors here in Hyderabad for changing its alternator. And after charging me all of Rs 5000, my Maruti Doc, Alam Bhai, asked me what the color of my old jalopy is called. And I said:
"Cypress Blue Metallic"
"Oh, it looks so better than new!"
...Vox Doc, Vox Dei!
...Posted by Ishani
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