The kid who drove a Ferari!

This story is about a kid who drove a Ferrari and the monk like me who shuns a Ferrari and other equally expensive worldly stuff simply because I can’t afford them.

As I typed the above title in MS Word, Bill (Gates) warned me, that my knowledge of life on the fast lane was in the red by highlighting Ferari in red…I believe you can see that. I spelt Ferrari with an ‘R’ less. I might have been literate enough to know the 3 R’s of literacy. Though, I still have no clue how the second and third R’s found its way into the group of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. I thought that an additional R in Ferrari was as redundant as the W and A in the evolution of the 3 R’s. A red Ferrari might be impressive but not a misspelt Ferari. That’s sacrilege.

This story is not about miss spelling Ferrari but on how it has become a brand associated with kids, and no, I’m not talking about their merchandise or the toy car replicas but the car itself. I got to watch a recent video of a kid less than 10 driving a Ferrari on youtube, I have not published the youtube link on this blog in an effort to project myself as a responsible citizen who is against promoting underage driving (to be read as too freaking jealous to post). I realised Ferrari is not any more one of those fantasy cars that you dream to own if your father is rich enough to own one and generous enough to let you drive and even more richer to own the road on which you get to drive it. Driving a Ferrari is no more a dream; a rich irresponsible dad with an equally spoilt offspring can make it happen.

With great concern I sent the link to my nephew who happened to live in a city close to where this blatant driving display was performed. The reply I got from my nephew was even more shocking, he put forward his arguments on the case to me a la Grisham and explained, that what the kid of 10 or less did was technically not illegal in the Indian court of law since according to the motor vehicle act of India it was a punishable offence only when the act was carried out on a public road and went on to point out to me that this episode happened within the confines of a private property apparently owned by the father of the accused / suspect (If I have the liberty to address a juvenile delinquent as such). Not sure of the legality of this argument but I was pretty impressed. I wished I was as aware of the legal nuances as my nephew when I was stopped by a cop within the by lanes of the erstwhile Blue cross road which technically was also part of a private property and had to cough up INR 50/- for riding / cycling my TVS 50 about a quarter century back.

He also went on to add more salt to my wound by sending me a few links of the same little kid driving a Range Rover Evoque and more links to the other cars from the kid’s father’s stable. Impressive it was. But a kid getting to drive a Ferrari and an Evoque when he must be barely 10, wonder what will motivate him to aspire for in the remaining 5 odd decades of his life going by the average life span in India. As a 15 year old I did start with a 50 CC and had something to work on for and managed to keep adding a few hundred CC’s over the years.