514 - driving off

-
My wallet was stolen four years ago. I lost my driver's license with it. So now I drive around without one. But I am really careful and break no signals or drive rashly or anything. If I see a police car on the road, I take a by-lane and wait there until it passes. If I see cops on the road, I behave really well. Not that I wouldn't do any of this if I did have the license but I try to avoid anything that will get me on the radar.
Source: www.pexels.com 

What this has meant though that I can't drive in other cities and I can't go on long distance drives. But this Sunday I just got fed up with feeling so constrained so I drove down to Bombay. This was the first time I was driving on the highway by myself and it was just so glorious! Given that the decision was spontaneous, I wasn't carrying any cash when I drove off from my house but my sweet little car, music, sunlit roads and mountains and clouds that somehow seemed so much more mystical from the driver's site.

I stopped at the Food Mall to withdraw cash and had a leisurely cup of coffee and drove off again.

I think for the first time, I really enjoyed driving...like I felt it to be a very softening experience. (I like driving through cities late at night or to KP any time of the day.) But this was beautiful, like an unknotting of something deep inside. 


Comments

Anonymous said…
Why not getting a license? Is it that hard to get?
You sure are a wild girl..
9:21 PM
Anonymous said…
Did the element of risk (driving without a license = flirting with cop-trouble) add something (excitement?) to the enjoyment of the long drive?
7:43 PM
Mukta Raut said…
immensely
9:43 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei
Read more