I'm sitting in a Honda car dealership as I type this out. It is about 8:30 am on a Saturday morning and I am still groggy. The quite refreshing (and absolutely free) French Vanilla Cappuccino coffee is trying its best to wake me up from my slumbering state. You may be wondering what the deal is - am I buying a new car? No, I'm waiting to have my car get its yearly inspection and emission test. An expense of about $80. That is if all is well with my car. The inspection consists of checking the innards of the car, the brakes, the tires, etc. for possible trouble spots. Each state in USA has its own standards for what the minimum measurements of roadworthiness of a car are. Unless my car meets all the requirements, it won't pass the inspection. And then there is the emission test. Crudely, it is a test of the volume of noxious fumes my car emits and adds to the smog above Philadelphia (already one of USA's most polluted cities). Unfortunately, car salesmen in USA don't get their reputation for being sharks for nothing. They will surely find something that costs a few hundred bucks to replace (if I'm lucky) that I will have to pay for. The $80 inspection and emission charge has to be paid whether the car passes inspection or not. This whole rigmarole happens every year until the poor darling (my car), fails the tests consistently. Then it is headed for the junk heap and cannibalized for spare parts. This is just one story in the buying and maintaining of a car in this great nation that is an automobile heaven. There are many other stories to be told before we reach the stage of an inspection.

I've lived in USA only since 1992 and older people at work keep telling me about the golden age of the 1950's and 1960's when cars were cheap, huge, gas guzzling monsters and such amazing fun to drive down wide streets and smooth, untroubled highways. Nowadays, the troubles start as soon as a person wants to drive a car. There are tests to be written and tests that take place on the road. The positive part is that almost everyone gets a license sooner or later. Unlike in Europe where months of instruction is required before a person can even take a road test and repeated road tests are necessary to get a license, it is possible in USA to write the test just once and pass the road test in one go. Of course, to fail any of these is an expensive proposition. Most people do fail the road test when they have to parallel park. Parallel parking is feat requiring great mental and physical agility. My only advice is to live in a state where it snows and to go for the road test early in the morning when there is a coating of snow in the parking lot. State law says that parallel parking is not required in the test under such conditions. So, that's how I got my license the second time around. Don't even ask about the first time. Okay, I'll let you in on another secret. Make sure the hand brake is down before you start shooting off down the highway with the driving inspector sitting next to you. License in hand, the next step is buying the car.

There are once again several theories about buying a car new or used. Used car salesmen are supposed to be among the lowest category of humans in this country. Most probably with justification too as they try to sell you any pile of junk (or lemon as they call it). And then, there are the new car dealerships. In this land of absolute equality between men and women, the equality stops at the sliding doors of a car dealership. Women are not taken very seriously and all the sales pitch is addressed to any adult male who accompanies the woman. If there is no man, then the women are given a cursory explanation and left to their own devices or completely ignored. In my case, such treatment may be justified because I don't like cars very much and I know even less about their working. All I know is that a car is a four wheeled box that gets me from point A to point B. Unfortunately, the flood of information about engine liter size, number of cylinders, fuel injection rates, displacements, V6 or V8 engines, % of metal in the car body, acceleration rates, and so on and so forth leave me pretty cold. That's a strange feeling for an engineer like me. At work, I am so careful with numbers. Outside of work, I just want to get it over with. I buy things if I feel happy about them. Because I was buying my first car and rather nervous about driving, I decided to go in for a used but almost new car. A new car loses most of its value in the first year and the gurus say that two-year-old cars with low mileage are a good buy. All the kinks have been ironed out and the car is now a lean, mean, road-fighting machine. That's the kind of car I bought. I saw the little red Honda sitting outside the (very reliable) used car dealer and I fell in love with it. I gave it a name immediately - Gulabi. Even though it took ages to accelerate from zero to 60 mph, I knew that this car was for me. The way a good looking dashing guy falls for the quiet girls in glasses who sits in the corner of the class. I went home that evening singing "yerra gulabi virisinadi" (a red rose has bloomed). I decided that I was going to make darling Gulabi my own and set about arranging finance and insurance for it.

Unless a person is Bill Gates or Azim Premji, one has to find a bank or credit union that will lend a person money to buy the car - its called financing. And here they have you by your most painful private parts. Cars are a necessity in USA and nobody saves all the money to pay for it completely. So, there is the customary visit to the bank and an interview with a bank official who shows her teeth to you in a parody of a smile. She asks for your whole life history as she tries to access what kind of a credit risk you may be. To get a loan from a bank one has to have a good "credit history". This means all house rentals, phone, electricity, and credit card bills add up. Any missed or late payments and one is immediately a "credit risk" and the interest rate gets hiked up. If all goes well, the next step is getting car insurance.

Buying car insurance is a Great Game akin to that described by Rudyard Kipling in Kim. Everyone tries to get the better of everyone else. No matter what gyrations one goes through, buying insurance the first time around compares with a mission to the moon. Everything counts, the fact that your mother gave birth to a boy and not a girl, the fact that you are under 25 years of age (or older than that), the fact that you live in a county that has a high rate of accidents (all those silly teenagers in Land Rovers you would like to strangle), how many cars are stolen from your area, are you lucky to be married (or unlucky to be in that state - as you please) and have a few brats, how many years you've had the driver's license, the color of the car, the security system in your car, etc., etc. The only thing that doesn't matter is your blood type (or maybe it does in a state other than Pennsylvania). It's a vicious cycle. Without insurance, you can't register a new car, without registration you don't get the number plate, and without a number plate you can't drive the car on the streets. They get you in a million different ways. So finally, insurance in hand, you are ready to actually buy the car. The car dealer accepts those hefty bank checks and hand over the ownership papers. He or she will escort you to an auto tags place where one can register the car. No registration, can't take the car home. So, you hand over many more hundreds of dollars to the state as you register the car and get your license plates. The new ones have a website address of Pennsylvania on them and come in designer colors too (tigers, trees, etc.). I picked the plain old blue ones. Finally, I was able sit in my Gulabi and drive her home. And then the real story began.

Oil and filter changes, filling up her dainty gas tank with more and more expensive gas, car washes, wax polishes, tire alignments, front brake replacements, and other maintenance charges. Yearly inspections, and registration charges (Pennsylvania charges $36 every year for letting me hang my blue license plate on the car), insurance, and my monthly payments to the bank. The story continues. I wish I could ride a bicycle to work. It would be a good exercise and definitely cost less!!!

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