Vijay Phanshikar 

 

 

IF HUMAN face is the signature of the person, then parked cars, too, can be treated as a signature of the person who owns or drives those vehicles. Cars, parked under the glittering lights of dealership showrooms on shiny floors are nothing but sheer beauties, no matter if the make is Mercedes or a Bentley or a Lamborghini or of any other brand. And when the same cars, owned and driven by different people in different conditions afterwards, get parked wherever possible in the big world, they act as signatures of the personalities of the owners and drivers, all right. When as a child, loosefooter happened to see the large numbers of cars parked in neat rows upon rows in the exceptionally well-maintained large garage of a royal family, he was absolutely floored by the beauty pageant. For a ten-year-old, that was a starting point of a life-long passion -- of driving cars and watching them with the keenest eye. That passion also led to evolution of a habit to mark the manner in which cars are parked by different people in different places - across the world. Over time, the loosefooter developed his own definitions of parked cars -- which are his personal views and have little do with the individual machines and their makes. The commentary, thus, is on how people park cars and what the loosefooter reads in those otherwise non-events. Nevertheless, when parked, cars do betray the styles of even the unseen personae.

 

Don’t we sense that some cars are parked royally -- as if they own not just the parking slot but also the whole world! Do not we also sense that some cars happen to get parked in spots that do not seem to belong to them! And don’t we also sense that some parking lots appear akin to fish-markets and some to jatras and melas! That is all thanks to how people park their cars. A superficial observer may not find anything amiss in parking of cars per se. Yet, upon a deep scanning of minute details of parked cars, one may arrive at some comment on the driver. Therefore, a keen observer may find some cars having been parked rather sheepishly and some only tentatively while some others diffidently. When parked, some cars look like Xantippe, the argumentative wife of Greek philosopher Socrates or like smart and very beautiful and cantankerous Katharine (in Shakespeare’s ‘Taming of the Shrew’), and some other parked ones look like coy wives of traditionally rich families while some other look like professional ladies working in corporate offices and still others like middle-class women working in banks or other places. Some, while parked, resemble medical doctors and some IT professionals with office badges hanging from their necks in coloured ribbons. Some cars, however, look like vehicles of arrogance and crude influence.

 

Their affluence is often shocking and their gait daunting -- when parked, let alone when being driven. Of course, there are ‘she’ cars and there are ‘he’ cars. There also are cars with suspect identity -- which one can certainly notice but cannot define accurately. But the loosefooter has found invariably that some cars appear to have been parked at places that do not suggest kinship between the car and the spot. Habitually on the prowl all over the city, the loosefooter finds all such models and gets engrossed in his silent conversation with all such parked cars. They are, of course, everywhere -- with burgeoning traffic especially in ever-expanding modern urban centres -- and offer a spectacle whose nuances are very many, like the innumerable shades of colour a nano-technology scanner may unravel through its lenses by looking at a loosely describable conglomeration of different paints. The romance of watching parked cars -- one may say!