As a kid, Indian cars I had a crush on

Let's hear your most profound and heartbreaking car crushes when you were growing up as a piston-pulsed kid, with petrol vapour respirating through your pulmonary valves and clouding your common sense – cars you totally doted on but could never buy yourself because you weren't earning and nor could convince your parents to buy.

BackstraightBoy recently shared this with other BHPians.

RaghuVis's thought-provoking post led me on a much more spirited charge down memory lane to pre-pubescence.

If you're anything like me, which I imagine a majority of TBHP members are, car crushes are a reality, 'crush' defined as an inordinate pining for the manifestly present but clearly unattainable.

So let's hear your most profound and heartbreaking car crushes when you were growing up as a piston-pulsed kid, with petrol vapour respirating through your pulmonary valves and clouding your common sense – cars you totally doted on but could never buy yourself because you weren't earning and nor could convince your parents to buy (let's hear the happy endings too, if you actually did!).

All cars seen in India (either sold locally or imported) at the time are eligible, until you were eighteen (older ages are acceptable too if your heart has not aged beyond eighteen in synchrony with the rest of your body!). We'll have to leave out the poster cars that could never be bought here (maybe for another post?), since that would widen the scope to fantasy and dilute the spirit of crushing on something (again, remember: available but not attainable).

Let me start with my bittersweet ones.

The earliest car for which I pined on without the moolah to afford it was the Maruti 1000 (yes, before it even became the Esteem), particularly in dark grey. This was in the late 90s. I remember a friend of my father who would visit us sometimes had one, and I was utterly starstruck by it. To me then, in that state of stunted tune, even a Mercedes didn't have the charm of that Maruti! And that metallic grey – boy, I'd have even my football painted in that colour if I could. But afford the car we couldn't. I wouldn't complain unduly, because we had a Premier Padmini and an eminently collectible Standard Herald (two-door coupe version) in that same metallic grey, eventually. Not a complete heartbreak then.

Then for a while, it was the Daewoo Cielo. At the height of this insanity, I don't think I'd ever before or have since been in more love with the front end of a car (the BMW E46 included). When a white copy was hired for a cousin's wedding sometime in the early 2000s, I simply lost it! I spent more time on its white seat covers than in the wedding hall those two days. And at the end of all the pomp and revelry, more tears were shed by me over parting with the rental car than by the bride's father at the separation from his daughter. Looking back at the front end of the Cielo now, I find it hard to think of something more absurd than my crush on it. Thank god they don't let teens run for president! (I'm not talking of course about the US, where they clearly are.)

Since the Cielo became a relic very quickly, my infatuation technology swiftly tracked down the next car for the big crash (no; that wasn't a typo): the Fiat Palio (ideally with the 1.6 but I was okay even if it didn't come with an engine!), particularly in green. My first European love, it left my heart in more pieces than the parts in its taut proportions. And another sordid chapter had been penned with petrol in the book of unrequited love.

Then as a parting gift to pre-puberty came the BMW E46 3 Series. Not sold here directly, admittedly, but I couldn't unsee Bond driving in the back seat of one several floors high up a building (in Tomorrow Never Dies), and then a few imports here and there in staggered stabbery. In silver, with those E46 eyes, it was a level of torture that scarred the tender linings of my heart, for the proverbial crush had peaked, unattainability wise, as C.C. Baxter might say.

Which is why, perhaps, even today when I see a pristine E46 in silver or blue, with those heavy eyes and the perfectly proportioned kidney grille squatting on short overhangs primed for an ambush, my heart skips a beat in the anguish of a crush that never died.

Thanks to BackstraightBoy once again! Check out BHPian comments for more insights & information.