I have refrained from quoting acceleration, fuel economy, braking distance and all other bell & whistle figures in this review, because 1 - its an Audi for Chrissakes! And 2- more importantly, i’m not a salesman selling you one! This review is just an excerpt from the chat the car and I had when I spent some time with her!.
Reverence and Praise to the High Priestess of the The Temple of Razor-sharp Handling. You shall heel! If not heads shall roll. The BMW 3 series eats the Audi A4 for breakfast, spits it out for lunch and retches up some more A4 cud to chew for dinner much like a Camel in the Sahara does. But the camel doesn’t have in its arsenal, either the inspiring roar of the normally aspirated petrol engine of the Beemer or the muted crackling thunder of the mind numbing but not-so-free-revving 2.0 Turbo-Diesel engine of the Audi!
“Will you not say my name again?”, she whispered as I touched her touched the delicate looking but butch leathers on the car. “Will you not breach my threshold and entire the holy divine space where matter and antimatter collide, not so much as to create the universe, but to limit itself to the Big Bang!” The Audi is potent. A hard-nosed I’ve-seen-it-all-philosopher.
It proclaims “Creation is nothing. Creating something perpetually- existent is child’s play. What is more important is destroying dying. If what you have created is present perpetually, people will take it for granted. Its novelty will decline. It will become a statue in Madame Tussauds. Thousands will flock to it for one year, and then its existence will be nothing more special than a lump of shaped-wax”
I don’t quite understand what it means. I don’t want to! What I want to do is jump in, mesh the starter button, floor the pedal to the ground and take off! But there’s that word again. Reverence. You don’t jump into an Audi and drive off! Its like taking Aishwarya Rai out for dinner to a local fast food joint. You prepare for it. You inhale
Then if you remember, you exhale! I opened the door, and closed my eyes. I could see…… I could see what made the Tora-Bora mountain range in Afghanistan famous. I could see what made the Eskimos get down on their stomach to enter their little igloo, never complaining about the lack of space inside the igloo as much as the claustrophobic entrance to get access to it.
Its difficult for me to describe the interiors. The best possible example I can probably give you would be that the interiors of the car have been given more thought than what Twinkle Khanna (an interior designer herself) would have given when she was designing the interiors of her own house! I’ve never ever seen a place where every little millimeter of space inside a car was taken into account while designing it. Every little nook & cranny was there, not by the idealism of lets-punch-a-hole-there-for-storage but by way of Lets-create-a-space-for-a-diamond-studded-Vertu. Knowing their clientele, its probably that or a titanium studded one. The MMI interface in the car understands what you want like the mommy of a 1 year old child uttering garbled words. Sometimes even when the child himself doesn’t understand what he wants
Press Start, and the first thought that enters your mind is that you switched on the Large Hallidron Particle-Collider underneath Switzerland. Hubba, hubba, hubba. The rev’s jump straight into my intestines, I feel like I’m trying to control Godzilla…Who is on my dog’s leash. You see her, she sees you. The car is trying to understand, to comprehend what exactly it is you asking of her. Sports mode, dynamic mode, comfort mode. Ahh…… Comfort mode should be a good start I think even though the cranium in my brain was shouting “Sport, Sport, Sport”.
I stand up as Aishwarya reaches my table, I politely ask her how she is doing. She looks at me and smiles. A smile which says, hey-dude-No-small-talk-or-I’m-out-of-here.Okay I say, I sense that the Audi is also trying to tell me the same thing. “If you’re not going to drive me the way I should be driven, then I don’t think I should be wasting your time (Translation – Don’t waste mine)”. Okay I say, and fire up Big Bertha.
“Lets see what you got” I tell her. ‘You little wuss’, I think to myself. ‘Sushmita Sen is much better than you. She’s as gorgeous as you, has a friendly attitude, is smart, has a sense of humour and most importantly, she unlike you is NOT as cold as Absolute Zero’ I sing to her imitating Pink Floyd’s voice. “All in all you’re nothing, just another brick in the wall!!!!”.
The tigress exhales, She has just been insulted. The war cry has been sounded. The Warlock gets dressed. The turbocharger spools up. The spear has been raised to eye level and then she fires. I try to evade…….. but the brutal acceleration of the spear cannot be disregarded. I maneuver like a Russian Sukhoi Mig-29 trying to evade the French Rafaele. But the Frenchman has locked onto me. I give it everything I’ve got, lock stock and barrel! Nothing I do or try to do can shake her off. She knows everything. She knows what I’m asking her to do, and more than that she knows exactly what I will ask her to do. She is a cynic. She calculates.
From her present sprawled out position. The predator contemplates the worst and most brutal steering feedback I will subject her to and how she will react to it. So when I actually go through with it, she has already prepared herself for it and takes it in her stride! I fight, I try my best, but it’s a losing battle. I’ve not been outnumbered, but outclassed! I lost not only because I underestimated her, but because even my realistic estimates fell way short of what she was really capable off.
I bring her back, I look into her eyes and say to myself “You got me this time, but my day will come! When I’ll make you jumpy, nervy and numb your electronics into annihilation”. She looks at me and says “I’m just the 2 headed dragon you’ve met. You still have to meet my 7 headed brother and my 9 headed mother”. I shudder…my spine and ribcage become brittle. I now know how it feels at a -273 degrees, at Absolute Zero. I understand what she is, why she is. But most of all, I understand……what I could not understand before.
I understand that Creation in itself is spectacular and applaudable. The Universe as it exists now……… perpetually… is still a huge mystery to us. But then why are the people more interested in a split second of time known as the Big Bang which is nothing compared to the age of the Universe. Why is it that people are more interested in the future……. in another split second of time known as the Big Crunch…….. Why are people not interested in the Millions and Millions of years of the past, present and future of the current Universe!
I understand now what the Audi was trying to tell me, That Creation and Destruction are the only two things that are important, The period between of Existence. Is nothing, but trival…… it is a supplement, an outcome, but not the pivot!