Photo Essay – Premier Padmini, Defence Colony
The world of yesterday.
[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
The old rusting car stood under a tree. Its grille was broken. The bonnet and the roof were covered with dry leaves. The windows were rolled up. The doors were locked. The steering wheel was cobwebbed.
The Delhi Walla came across a discolored Premier Padmini outside a bungalow in Defence Colony. It was a rare sighting. This car is no longer in production. It is also no longer seen on the roads.
One could see through the grimy windows that the seats were coated with thick layers of dust. The rear glass exhibited the dense foliage on the other side of the car. Through the windows, even those green leaves looked dusty and lifeless, but also mysterious as if imbued with yesterday’s secrets.
Our present looked like our past.
Call the driver
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In a huge, faceless city like Delhi where people are constantly moving, sudden appearance and disappearance of cars outside houses does not always raise too many eyebrows. There are so many other more important things to worry about. But yes, one thing is certain. Behind each neglected car like the one in this blog, there is a story that can easily fill a novel. We may wonder sometimes about the owners of these cars and their murky circumstances, but I guess as a rule that’s all we can do. Being from Auto industry, I am unable to restrain myself from mentioning in addition that there are lots of individuals and organizations including NGOs in Delhi who are supposed to be involved in philanthropic activities, but they have a lot of unaccountable income. They spend it on acquiring fleets of cars. One of their employees once told me that their cars are all getting rusted as they are not used often enough and they continue to buy new, flashy cars as status symbols.Then there are politico-criminal incidents in which the cars are badly smashed and battered. When they finally arrive in workshops for repairs, employees like me can only conjecture about what must have happened to the occupants. The stories about these incidents are generally hushed up and people who represent the owners are always very evasive. I can remember one such case of a BMW in which the insurance company rejected the insurance claim and the vehicle kept standing in our workshop for several years, a mute witness…
🙂