The World on Four Wheels

Travel is my passion - the thing that makes my world go round . More often than not , the joy lies not just in the destination but also in the journey itself . Every single journey has given me tons of memories that have shaped my understanding of our beautiful world and its inhabitants who come in many different shapes , colours and personalities, quirks included .

I just got back from a getaway at a coffee estate in Chikmagalur . The driver of the car that we hired was an interesting character , possibly bipolar , who drove the car like a bullock cart until we reached the nearest petrol bunk.  I was quite sure I saw a couple of pedestrians overtake our car . Once we reached the petrol bunk, the driver insisted on filling the diesel and the air all by himself , lest the attendant touches his precious Kohinoor of a car . Once he was done , the other side to his personality emerged . He started to drive like a madman on steroids . I had my doubts about our reaching the destination with our limbs and sanity intact . We made it though and as they say , the rest is history .

It got me reminiscing about the quirky and interesting taxi drivers whom I have had the fortune of meeting in my travels so far . Notable among them include the driver who drove us from Chandigarh to Delhi on a foggy New Year morning when the visibility was near zero . That did not deter him from wearing his sunglasses , Ray Ban aviators at that . I suppose he wanted to make a stylish entry into heaven in case he managed to crash the car . But destiny had other plans and we reached our destination .

Another driver who got my attention was the one who drove us from Kochi to Allepey. He spoke passionately about strikes. Strikes are apparently a common occurrence in that part of the country . He gloated about how he and his friends would take off on road trip to exciting places like Bangalore every time a strike was announced , leaving some unsuspecting customer in the lurch . We human beings love our holidays- for some it is a vacation, for others it is a strike.

This trip down the memory lane would be incomplete without recollecting about the drive from Udaipur to Jodhpur. The taxi driver was probably in the business of launching rockets into outer space in a past life and his driving in the current life was hugely influenced by the past one. Somewhere along the way , he brought the car to a screeching halt in front of a tree that had many red coloured threads tied to the branches , with a building behind where the board said “Om Banna Mandir”. The chief deity of this temple is a rickety old Bullet motorbike which is placed in a glass case and perched atop a concrete podium .It is surrounded by pictures of a young man dressed in traditional Rajput clothes . Legend has it that in the year 1988 a young man by name Om Singh Rathore was driving his motorcycle on high speed when he lost control and rammed it against a tree causing his death on the spot. The police took the bike to the police station only to find it missing next morning . Suspecting foul play , they went looking for it and found that it was back at the spot where the accident had occurred . They took it back to the police station , drained the petrol tank and locked the bike but much to their chagrin, the bike was back at the accident spot . The locals were convinced that the bike was possessed by the spirit of its dead owner and built a temple for “Bullet Baba” and its dead owner around the tree where the accident had occurred.

People driving past the highway stop to pray to what is possibly the first prototype of a self driven vehicle and even offer liquor to“Bullet Baba” and its dead owner, Om Banna , seeking blessings for a safe trip . Who cares about seat belts and safe driving when you are blessed with paranormal protection !

I have always maintained that it takes people of different kinds to make this world an interesting place . Taxi drivers are a key ingredient that make our travel moments memories that last forever.