BENGALURU: A doctor may never have told you this: Driving a car on an open highway can be a therapeutic experience – a stress-buster, a mind-coolant, almost a meditative experience, with or without music. While ‘open’ is the key word here, it is equally therapeutic on a congested city road, albeit with a difference. Living in Bengaluru, one can’t do without the latter, but it can be a therapeutic experience, too.
Firstly, it is the geared car which is more exciting to control and drive, rather than the automatic ones, which are filling the market. It is the one that can offer a more complete therapeutic experience. Driving an automatic car can be as boring as eating boneless meat, or a seasoned cricket team beating kindergartners in a match. It is difficult to just sit and steer a vehicle while the gears are managed by automation. It feels incomplete unlike a geared car, which offers satisfaction, and a conviction, that when you reach your destination you have been in complete control all along, not leaving a penny to automation.
Long drives, like the ones you go on between cities and towns, offer a meditative experience. The road ahead is fairly open. You keep the vehicle within a lane, your senses alert as you hit the maximum permitted speed, and you take in all the sights, sounds and the smells in the air (open window advised) into your senses – the steady hum of the engine, the ‘swoosh’ of passing vehicles, the greenery on both sides of the road (or the brown, dry expanse, if greenery is lacking), the aroma of cooking in small, modest houses, the fragrance of manure (yes, fragrance!) while passing through hamlets and villages, and a whole range of them that fill up your senses.
Driving requires you to keep your senses alert so you keep accidents at bay, but those very senses are also accommodating all these sights, sounds and smells as you cruise along. It’s all the more so when you have company in the car and conversations tend to distract you from keeping the drive safe. That itself is a therapeutic exercise.
People say driving is stressful in a city like Bengaluru. Well, on the face of it, that may appear so. But there is a therapeutic side to it. Every Bengaluru driver who completes a day without crashing into another vehicle or running someone down should allow taking some pats on the back, if not medals on the chest. Not only has such a motorist achieved an accomplishment by saving someone else’s property, but has also saved countless lives. In a city devoid of footpaths, pedestrians walking on the roads – the spaces meant for motorised vehicles to ply it is the motorist’s achievement to have done the noble deed to emerge as a saviour of life and property. Such a motorist would have saved women with children, frail elders, two-wheeler riders zooming across lanes, and kids suddenly crossing the roads, including those begging on the city streets. All in a day!
A motorist, who has ensured the safety of all these people, must boast about being a skilled driver. Instead of looking at driving as a stressful exercise, motorists who keep to road discipline should look at it as a sport and a therapy, which in itself can be a satisfying experience.
Driving – whether on an open highway or on a congested road – is like a microcosmic experience of life and living. Slow down when there is a problem, negotiate it, put it behind and speed up again. Don’t look at the problem you passed in the rear-view, keep your eyes ahead. Accelerate when the road is uphill, let go of the accelerator when it’s downhill. Just relax and enjoy the drive! Enjoy life!