The first machine he actually bought and used was the Bajaj Stride – an ugly effort from Bajaj to reinvent the Vespa Clone. But then, he didn’t have to buy new machines as long as there were cars and bikes around him that needed some kind of attention.
Later in life, I offered him my first car, a Padmini with bucket seats and floor shift gears when my company decided to give me a Maruti 800. He travelled by train to Mumbai and promptly drove the ‘black Fiat’ home. More than anything else, he was happy to have something to fiddle around with. He kept the Padmini (which ran on a cooking gas cylinder) even after he gifted himself a silver Ford Escort diesel.
Needless to say, he was a huge influence on me and was instrumental in me ending up doing more than pushing machines. And I think I made him very happy when I left the keys of the Mercedes-Benz C200 long termer hanging in the dash when I visited him at Thiruvananthapuram. The last time we met, he told me about an epic journey in the ‘black Fiat’ that saw him nurse the car for over 24 hours with a radiator leak. He obviously relished the experience.
B Jayaprakash, JP to his friends and Maman to me, passed away on April 10, 2009. He was 58. Visiting my hometown will never be the same again.
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