It's that time in life :)

Exciting times around me :). The awesome (read, grueling) experience of Masters is culminating beautifully, what with a bucketful of treasures for each one of us. And to think of it, we were just getting started! Time here has gone by insanely fast, but has managed to gift us some beautiful friends, that knowledge which we all came yearning for and that one "offer" which is the gateway to our dreams :). All that we had dreamt of all our lives are for ours to attempt now; attempt and succeed :).

Everyone is entitled to their own small and very personal dream, and there's one I have been nurturing since long. To state it briefly, I have loved cars like hell since the time I had first loved, now is the time to own one! My affair with cars dates back quite early when my uncle handed me a copy of the lone car mag in India at that time, Auto India. That was a time when kids used to live by Raj comics and Tinkle, and here I was swooning over a Volvo concept car! My love story had started, I still did not have my heroine though ;). I finally spotted her outside my school! It was a blazing red Zen that made me stop in my track and drool! The following weeks were spent sifting through newspapers to find more about her. Sadly, we did not have google during those days :(. I finally could grab a copy of Auto India which carried a test drive report of the Zen. The car was a driver's delight and the author was head over heels with it :). More than the numbers, what impressed me was this line - "the gear-shift is as smooth as a hot knife cutting through butter" :).

The Zen is and will always be my most favourite car :). Cut to present, I am at the brink now and want to so much get the *best* car my money can buy! After all, this would be my first car, and I want to spend my money sensibly. As you might have heard, love is beautiful until you have to spend out of your pocket ;). So, my first instinct was to rummage through every "sensible" car in the market and compare their specifications. Sadly, the definition of "sensible" just did not go with my interpretation of "best". Every other car I stumbled upon turned out to be a bloated bag of compromises, a very suave bag at that ;). All of them tried to do many things well and hence failed to communicate a confident emotion. And that's when I turned to cars which were not perfect. They made no bones about their shortcomings, but cried their hearts out to connect to mine. They definitely were candidates of "best" for me :). They all seemed to say the same thing - "grab my steering wheel, give the stick a nudge and put the pedal to the metal, let's have some fun!". I no longer needed those clumsy specifications to judge, because the cars were talking to me :).

This piece is dedicated to such cars which get written off by so-called car experts as impractical means of transport. But for enthusiasts (not experts), cars are not mere means to commute from point A to point B. Cars are partners in a relationship so close that it is strengthened after every drive :). These are unpretentious machines with an identifiable heart. These make the best companions, the perfect second love :)

PS: My search for *my* best car goes on. May the best one win! :)