The Saga of nostalgia on wheels

Pune, March 21: One resident of Prabhat Road is an extremely worried man. He swears that when he was entering his house today morning, a ...

Pune, March 21: One resident of Prabhat Road is an extremely worried man. He swears that when he was entering his house today morning, a uniformed MIG 31 fighter pilot raced past him on a massive motorcycle.

The workers of a garage near Dahanukar colony did more than a double back flip when, on a slumbering Sunday afternoon, the Maharani of Jodhpur stepped in to request some water for her silver coloured royal chariot.

The sights that were witnessed across a 60 km stretch of Pune today were not miracles. For the 82 vehicles that were flagged off in The Indian Express-VCCCI vintage car rally at Hotel Blue Diamond at 8.30 today morning, were testimony only to the glorious heritage of history. An ode not to the future, but to a saga of nostalgia on wheels.

The rally which was flagged off by Shahu Maharaj, Maharaja of Kolhapur, was led by the 1935 Avon Standard Special driven by Rajendra Kelshikar, CEO of Hotel Blue Diamond, who must have kept his eyes glued to traffic rules. And with good reason. Not leastbecause accompanying him till an emergency call took him away was the sporting Commissioner of Police, KK Kashyap.

Following close behind was the maroon coloured 1919 Fiat, wedding car of the Travassos and the oldest car in the rally.

It was smooth sailing for the Rolls Royces, Fords and Dodges past the silent colonial style villas of Kahun Road and past the white-steepled churches tucked away behind the Race Course. Then came the first hurdle — Prabhat Road — when the city traffic finally started testing the mettle of the best, and the vast distance between the old and the contemporary was thrown open for inspection. Ask spectators on the sidewalks who they think won the competition, and the almost unanimous answer is — the vintages. One of them did try to put these claims of superiority to the test — but his bicycle was easily outdistanced by the Thakkar’s Rolls Royce.

An unexpected exit from among the serious contestants was Monisha Dossa’s all-women’s crew in the car from Richard Attenborough’sGandhi. One of the youngest rallyists on the Indian circuit, Monisha’s psychological instinct’ of not covering the convertible while competing did not help as the car suffered a series of breakdowns, before she valiantly pulled it into Blue Diamond, after completing the rally, at 12.30 p.m. The first car to return to Blue Diamond was the Avon SS driven by Kelshikar. A total of 80 cars and motorcycles completed the course with no traffic problems to blemish the day.