12 years and 3 countries later, I知 in! So the alarm rang at 7AM. It’s Sunday and I had no intention of actually waking up for the next 2 hours. Glanced at the notifications of phone and saw this email with the words Team-BHP and APPROVED in it. 30 mins later I am on my dining table with a hot tea and typing this excitedly!
My first attempt with membership was back in 2010 when I was a college dude using a windows XP desktop+CRT monitor with 256MB RAM and an intel processor pentium hooked up with a dial up connection of few Kbps bandwidth while a Nokia xpress music sat beside me.
Now I am typing on a mobile which has many times the hardware fire power while fitting in my palm doing multiple Mbps over 4G while my laptop sits beside me.
Back then we had a car with 1400 cc turbocharged engine that did 0-100 in ~17s. Right now it’s a 2000 cc turbocharged engine doing 0-100 in ~7s.
Certainly, technology changed exponentially while changes in (IC engined) cars were incremental. What stayed constant was that both the cars were absolutely fun to drive.
I think there were 4 further attempts at registration spread over last 12 years and here I am, Hello!
I’m in my early 30’s living in The Netherlands, originally from Kerala, India.
I (like other zillion Indians living abroad) is a software engineer.
I currently drive a BMW 3 series G20 and absolutely love this car.
I learnt to drive quite early on and believe it or not, I learnt by observing. Back when I was in 5th standard, my mom joined a driving school so she can drive our new (to us) Maruti 800. Since she didn’t want to leave me alone at home, I had to tag along. Sitting in an old Ambassador in the middle back row crammed with ladies taking lessons, it was absolutely embarrassing for me and I kept it a secret from my friends. But I also enjoyed it to the core as I eagerly socked up all the tips and tricks being taught in there.
For some perspective, my favourite seat in public buses of Kerala was the front horizontal row facing the driver where I can just observe and admire the whole process of driving (it was a sensory feat, how those old leyland buses were driven and gears shifted). Getting to sit in those seats in limited stop buses zipping dangerously on narrow sections of NH 17 in Kerala always gave me a huge adrenaline shot.
But as with any good things in life it rarely happened. My mom thought (rightfully so) it was too dangerous in case of a crash so those seats were the last priority to be only chosen when no other seats were available.
I overcompensated for it when I grew up and started living abroad by always sitting when possible in the first row seat almost parallel to the driver of the Volvo\ Scania \ MAN low floor buses on duty in those cities.
Back to me, after the driving lessons ended, one fine day I offered my mom in font a full cohort of relatives to drive the car around in the compound of our ancestral house. My mom was take back asking me silly questions like “do I know which is the brakes” etc. I drove like a pro in that compound, and did a reverse parallel parking. And my whole family was flabbergasted, if I remember correctly even a premium ISD call was made to my dad to check if he had secretly taught me. Proudest day of my life. Unknown to them, I have been training by reversing out and in to our garage for past months.
Anyway my excitement soon died out when it was strictly made clear I won’t be allowed to drive in any way and as a consolation price, I was appointed the official parking valet of my family. The only supportive figure was my grandfather who appreciated and encouraged me and I’m eternally grateful for him for that. I savoured the few minutes I used to get when he allowed me to park and take out the car from garages. A weird after effect was that for a long time after that till I got my license, I was super confident in manoeuvring in an out of even the tightest of parking spot, but not driving on straight roads.
As fate would have it, I ended up living and working for an extended period (7+ years) in Singapore, arguably the worst place in the world to be a driving enthusiast. New cars started at SGD 80,000+ ( 1SGD = ~ 50 INR) for a bare basic hatch back and life of car was capped at 10 years. And to make it worse the country is too small to drive around. Fact is normally you won’t need a car there as the public transport was cheap, high quality covering every nook and corner of that island. Taxi’s were relatively cheap too. But for me, a car was not a need, but a want. Even then it made no financial sense to put that kind of money and then drive around in the small city state. I had to make do with frequent trips to neighbouring Malaysia were renting cars were cheaper with good quality highways. COVID put brakes on those, and for two years my only option was an app based daily rentals in Singapore. An app called getgo became very popular after 2020 and it was very convenient to use, priced at around 8$ an hour at peak times plus 40cents per km including fuel. Their fleet started with mostly Mazda 3s, but has diversified quite a bit recently to even include full electric models.
When we made a decision to move out of Singapore, ability to own a car was one of key factor in my mind.
Netherlands is not the cheapest place to own a (IC engined) car, but compared to Singapore it’s a lot more affordable. We moved in early 2022. One of the first thing I did after landing here was to get a car.
And things have a knack of working out at the right time. I found out about a Team-BHP meet that happened in the Netherlands which prompted me to try my luck again and here I’m.
Thanks all for reading, looking forward to meeting some great people and great fun here.
Last edited by Aditya : 13th September 2022 at 16:39.
Reason: Where - were
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