Sachin and the Art of Driving

DRIVING IN THE UK could be an issue unless you are used to it. This is because a missed turn can be cost­ly. You will then have to negotiate the maze of the city’s traffic and by the time you get your act right, you have lost valuable time. Also, in some parts of the city you don’t get the chance to drop off and parking, needless to say, is a real challenge. Leeds, a smaller city in comparison to some of the others, is no different. As my car reached Leeds on June 15, and I was trying to fig­ure out my apartment on Great George Street, we missed a turn. It took us quite a while to fig­ure things out since no U-turn was permitted and no way could the car reverse either.

It can get really frustrating when you are on a deadline. While there is an urge to sort things out with not much traffic on a Sunday, the grim reminder of getting a ticket in your mail two weeks down the line stops you from doing so!

This is where I was actually missing Kolkata. “Dada, move a little. Just need to get the car back.” In Kolkata, it is very much the norm. And then when the traffic sergeant walks up, a polite request, “Five minutes. I’m just moving the car. Please kindly allow.” On most occasions, it works and things get done.

Not so here. We had to drive past the univer­sity and eventually found a right turn at least a couple of miles up to come back to the city centre and to the apartment. That’s what takes me to Sachin Tendulkar and what happened with him in Yorkshire in 1992. Sachin was the first overseas player to play for Yorkshire and he did so when he was just 19. He spent three-and-a-half months here at the time and it was an enriching as well as a learning experience for him. And one of the core lessons learnt was how to drive a car around the UK. The Sachin of today is a fantastic driver and has driven thousands of miles around the country. Not so then and it was a learning experience.

Sample this from him. “One of the first problems was that I had little idea of the roads [in Yorkshire] and had to follow my team-mate Richard Blakey as he drove to the ground. I was not really used to driving in England and often opted for the fastest lane while driving to the ground. There were occasions when I missed an exit and also lost Richard in the process. It was difficult to turn back and I cursed myself for not staying in the slowest lane, where it would have been easier to see the exit. There were no mobile phones then and getting lost meant I would be late for practice, which I hated. I had actually driven a little in England in 1991 when I was there to play a few games of league cricket. Back then, I stayed with the former India fast bowler Atul Wassan and he was generous enough to give me his car to drive around. He asked me if I had driven before and I assured him that I had passed all the tests, had an international licence and was confident of my driving skills. He said the key to driving in the UK was not to use the brake much and just to follow the lanes. However, the very first day ended in disaster. I was in the fast lane when all of a sudden the car came to a halt. There was no power and the car would not restart, and I panicked when I saw a string of cars behind me. I told Atul, ‘Gadi start nahi ho raha hai yaar!’ [The car is not starting, my friend!] Atul initially thought I was joking and asked me to accelerate. Anxious, I said to him that I was trying to, but there was no power and nothing was working. Only then did we realise that we had run out of fuel. Atul immediately asked me to put on the hazard lights, and in my state of nervousness, it took me ages to find the switch in the unfamiliar car. Finally, Atul put on the hazard lights for me. Somehow, we got the car onto the hard shoulder, then we called the AA and after a while, a breakdown vehicle arrived.”

The other problem is parking. It is a real nightmare. While having a car makes a huge difference in terms of adding to work efficiency, to get a spot to park in the city centre is like get­ting a lottery. It is a norm that you park at least a mile away from where you have to go and then leg it. If it is a meal that you are going for, it is a nice exercise at the end of the meal.

Finally, it is about the accent. If you come to this part of the world for the first time, it is kind of inevitable that you will struggle to pick up the accent. It is not exactly London and there is a very particular drawl. Some of the words are hardly audible and if the phone line isn’t great, it could be a real issue. It happened to me soon after I had settled into my fifth-floor apartment on George Street here in Leeds city centre. While the view and all else were fantas­tic, the windows wouldn’t open and I started to feel suffocated after a point. To call the cus­tomer care number was the first option and they put me in touch with maintenance. That’s when the challenge started. Despite my years of travelling around the world, I was finding it hard to pick up what was being said at the oth­er end. It was as if we were speaking two dif­ferent languages. For Sachin in 1992, it would have been much harder. It was only his sec­ond tour of the UK for a reasonable length of time and to stay in Yorkshire for three months couldn’t have been easy.

But then all of these things are life lessons. They allow you to get by and enrich you socially and culturally. And eventually, things do get done. Somehow, people do get around these issues. Either you don’t drive in the city centre or figure out ways of doing so. People do help and in a worst-case scenario, you learn the hard way.

In my case, each of these learnings has enriched me. They made me more patient and helped me deal with situations better.

drivingSachin TendulkarUKYorkshire