Another year, another auto expo

One thing I really miss about being in Delhi is going to the Auto Expo. For those too stupid to understand the self-explanatory title, the Auto Expo is a collection of fancy cars kept inside really cramped halls while millions throng to get closer to these hunks of metal while involuntarily rubbing their armpits in your face. It’s like Kurla station except with women forced to stand in micro minis.

I understand as a Punjabi man I am committing a sin by saying this, but I didn’t even care about the cars and their shiny alloys. To me the Auto Expo was a perfectly manufactured microcosm of India and Bharat trying to push each other around and trying to co-exist. My favourite memory remains that of the Tata Indica back when people other than taxi drivers and call centre operators actively considered buying one. To meet viewer expectation, the Tata group had taken over an entire pavilion only to showcase the Indica in various colours and avatars. One of these was a Tata Indica with a body made completely of stainless steel, so shiny that it could have passed off as a Marwari woman at a kitty party underneath the lights. Next to the Indica was a signboard saying ‘Please don’t touch and one of the unfortunate models companies hire to satisfy the high concentration of creepy Delhiites trying to take up skirt shots with their cameras. Five hours later when I walked through the same pavilion, the minor rope barricade around the metal Indica had been breached. The entire body had fingerprints of roughly a million people who had touched, caressed and molested every single nook and cranny of the car. The model looked suitably stunned and gazed into the distance contemplating suicide and in the middle of this, a fellow visitor decided to check the cars suspension on his own and violently started pushing the front of the car up and down. I bet shows in Geneva and Detroit offer a lot of things but being able to personally jerk off the cars of your choice is an option you can only forcibly exercise in India.

While I’m not holding my breath, I also hope this year women working at the event don’t have to face verbal abuse. At the expo one always finds the kind of dialoguebaazi Bollywood makes sound cute coming off the mouth of Arjun Kapoor. Some choice ones I remember include staring at women and saying, ‘Waise model toh yeh bhi accha hai’, while supposedly talking about the car and perennial favourite of the less subtle, ‘Madam aapko do stroke chahiye ya chaar stroke’. Somehow because they get paid a lot for the job they do suddenly makes it okay for having to deal with this behaviour which isn’t exactly limited to ‘those poor people’ Delhiites constantly like to brush under the carpet. Hopefully Noida won’t live up to its reputation.

Hope you have a great time at the expo, I’m going to make the smarter decision of downloading the latest season of Top Gear instead.