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Valentine Day Special: For the love of cars – Che Bhatt’s obsession with the automobile

Valentine Day Special

For the love of cars

Che Bhatt’s Obsession with the automobile

By Mayank Bhatt

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Valentine Day Special: For the love of cars – Che Bhatt’s obsession with the automobile

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Valentine Day Special: For the love of cars – Che Bhatt’s obsession with the automobile

TORONTO, February 14:

As the escalator took us deeper into the depths of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, I sensed the lights brighten. The cavernous halls were well lit by hundreds of bright lights that emitted more light as they bounced off the chrome of the automobiles on display.

Suddenly, it seemed the lights had become brighter. I looked around to search for the new source of light but couldn’t immediately find it. Then I looked at Che. His Bugs Bunny smile was like a million watt bulb that flooded the Toronto Auto Show 2009 with blinding incandescence.

“That’s a Nascar exhibit, and the cars are Dodge Charger and Ford Taurus,” Che informs his parents, “I have the models.” He looked at his mother, and then at me, and continued smiling.

The $40 family pass was expensive. There would be less grocery at home this week, I had mentally calculated, when giving the

currency notes (“Bills. They are called bills,” Che educates me) at the ticket window.

The smile on his face was more than the expected return on the $40 investment I could have bargained for. Che continued to smile for the next three hours with the same intensity as he went from one hall to another on a serendipitous journey that transported him into a world where he didn’t need anyone or anything else.

Che was with his first and only love: Cars.

There couldn’t have been a better way to spend the Valentine’s Day in Toronto; our first in our new home.

For a prepubescent boy, love means loving his mother

completely unselfconsciously. I often ask him whether he has a girlfriend, or whether he likes someone in a special way. His annoyance is not because he doesn’t have a girlfriend, but because he doesn’t feel the need to have one.

The place was milling with automobile enthusiasts. We began our tour at Hall F. The cars were all incredibly shaped and resembled paper planes I made when I was Che’s age. He was giving us a lowdown on each of the cars on display.

“This is an Elise by Lotus,” he says, “and that is MC 12 by Maserati, next to it is F430 Spider by Ferrari and in the opposite row are Phantom Coupe by Rolls Royce, and Gallardo by Lamborghini.” He has turned a full circle, taking in all the cars on display in the hall.

“How do you know all this?” I ask.

“The logo is in the front, and the brand name is at the back,” he explains.

I nod in amazement, wondering how much this 11-year-old son of mine knows about cars, and how did he get to know so much.

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Valentine Day Special: For the love of cars – Che Bhatt’s obsession with the automobile

I ask him, and suggest, “Internet, right?”

“No, games,” he corrects. “Need for Speed and 18 Wheels Convoy have the latest car models.”

“Ah! Computer games,” I sigh.

“No, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP,” he corrects me again.

Che’s commentary continues into the other halls. He knows all the makes and all the models. He is keen I buy a car. I tell him I won’t. “We can’t afford to buy a car right now.”

At this, Mahrukh, his mother and my wife of 13 years, joins him: “We can get a used car for less than $2000.”

“Automobiles, per se, are bad for this planet,” I repeat lamely. It’s an argument I’m going to lose pretty soon I realize. In North America one’s patriotism is judged by how positively attuned one is to big retail and big cars.

This is not what I grew up to believe. India of the 1970s, when I grew up from boyhood to youth, had only two car manufacturers.

Then in the early 1980s, a third one came on the scene and captured the country’s imagination like nothing else did. Maruti, modeled on Suzuki’s small car, changed the face of India. When economic liberalization was unleashed in the 1990s, car manufacturers from across the world – having lost their customers everywhere – set shop in India, giving multifarious options to a people who really didn’t need so many choices.

Che was born in an India that was becoming an economic success story. Good cars were an inherent part of that story, even if good roads weren’t.

Cars and MacDonald’s.

Around the time Che was a year old, MacDonald’s entered the Indian market with a bang. It was an unimaginably huge success in Mumbai and New Delhi. To begin with there were just two outlets in Mumbai. There would be hour-long queues to get a table. To get kids attracted to junk food MacDonald’s gave free toys with its ‘Happy Meals’.

These toys were miniature cars. “Models,” Che informs me. “They’re called models.” He began a collection that sprawled into hundreds of such model cars. “They are made by Hot Wheels and Maisto,” he educates me, adding, “and the haulers are by Matchbox.”

There was a lacuna: He still hadn’t seen real cars of the toys he had. That was filled during a family trip to Singapore, where Che went to his first auto show. “That was smaller,” he notes, seeming happy and triumphant. “This one has all of them, even Hummer; that one didn’t.”

He quickly adds: “But Hummer is a fuel inefficient car.” Wisdom acquired in the last six months of living in pollution free Toronto.

So, did he have a good time? “Yes, yes,” he asserts emphatically. And did we – his parents – have a good time, too? I think so. There can’t be a better way to spend the Valentine’s Day than to experience the joy on the face of our son, the result of our love. 937 words