blind man driving, watch out!!!

As long as I can remember I always wanted to drive a car, maybe because I saw people do it on tv and it felt “cool and awesome”. But a few years went by since I was a 13 year old watching, Vin diesel race in a fast and furious movie. And I finally was old enough to enroll myself into a driving school, which was a complicated procedure in itself. All the documents I had to produce to enroll,could fit in a briefcase and the fee was preposterous. Then the eye test where I had to read Malayalam words in different sizes, I told the doctor I can’t read it; I of course meant that I didn't know to read any Malayalam letters and i could read the English version of it. She just asked me how many letters were in the last row, and then she asked me in a concerned and disbelieving tone “you can see, right?”. And the attested copies of certificates’ that include my caste certificate and voters id. (ya even I can vote!)And the blood group test certificate, I mean why do they want that, to give a drivers license? (Do they say “oh you have an O negative blood group I’m sorry sir you can’t get a license, people with O negative blood group are bad drivers!”) And finally the day came when I was to take my first driving lesson.

                                              The instructor asked me my name and whereabouts, then started a brief tutorial on all the basic stuff anyone must know before they are allowed to actually drive the car. Like the clutch, the gears and the break, he also told me the break and the accelerator needed the right foot and the clutch needed the left foot like air to the human beings. (I fought hard to not laugh at the silly over-dramatized comparison, but I kept my calm) then I switched to the first gear from neutral and my first experience behind the steering wheel of a car began. (Well technically my second, my first experience involved a government jeep with a dented back door and a broken lamp post, but that one doesn’t count) The pull I felt when the car accelerated, hmm I’m never going to forget that. And at the end of my first 5 kilometers the instructor asked me if I have driven a car before that,and the first day's lesson ended there.(Now I laugh at my classmates who try desperately to get a compliment from teachers, but there’s no denying the fact that it absolutely rocks when you actually get a compliment.) But the second day started with the guy driving before my turn forgetting to take his foot of the clutch and getting smacked on the head for that mistake, to top it off when it was my turn it started raining hard (god wanted to have a laugh at my failing attempt to stay cool) and the car we drove was only designed to take as many students as it can for each trip and to have as many shaky, rickety and rusty parts in it as it can, not for silly reasons like driver safety. This I say because the car had no wiper.

                        But I did okay, didn’t get a compliment but I as long as I didn’t get a smack on my head I called it a job well done. And when I was driving it felt like on of those horror movies where the actor was driving through a monster infested forest, and they know something bad is going to happen. All I could make out in that torrential rain were dim silhouettes of on coming vehicles, and each time I saw it, I pictured my mangled carcass photographed as the latest road-kill on the front page of the next day’s news paper with the headline “blind college student crashes his car onto an oncoming truck killing his fellow students”. (I’m not blind by the way I have 20/20 vision, for any of you who may feel an urge to call up and complain to who ever issues the license) But don’t worry my class ended as this new blog post so clearly proves – I’m as alive as a dog chasing its tail. Or am I just imagining to write this post from my after life someone post a comment tell me I’m wrong.