Twenty- five Seven

How to Insure your Car in Mumbai

October 30, 2012
Premier Padmini (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In today’s day and age when everybody has a car getting it insured seems like child’s play. I mean how difficult can it be? When you buy a car, the insurance agent is already waiting with a pen for you to sign the dotted line even before you drive off and thereafter it is only a matter of routine when you get a reminder in the mail and a call from the agent asking when he/she can come and pick up the cheque……… What can be easier than that?

The problem arises when you have an old car which no one wants to insure. We have an old car which at one time was way ahead of its time. It had a souped up engine, it was airconditioned , it had four speakers and the best music system and it even had a Fiamm horn whose loud boom had all the traffic give way for a piddly little white Premier Padmini . It is sad but this car which once was known affectionately by all who sat in it and all who drove it, even all who maintained it is today a sad spectacle . It’s decline from glory began when the girls felt ashamed to sit in the back when all the other kids came to school in Mercedes and Toyotas. Indeed they forgot those days when this peppy little Fiat ( I prefer to call it that) brought them home from the hospita, took them for rides while their ears ached as babies ( that was the only airconditioning we knew of since our home was not air conditioned in those days). Alas today this old faithful is already classified as vintage. In a few years it will become an antique………..

Some old friend of Hubby Dear once advised him never to sell this car which is why it languised in our garage, occupying pride of place in prime property while it accumulated rust with disuse. Suddenly experiencing the void our girls left in our lives, Hubby Dear was consumed with this mad passion to revive the Old Girl and restore her to her former glory. So began our tryst with Mr. Swadi a crusty old 80 year old with a big booming voice and a commanding presence. Like a little school boy Hubby Dear was summoned to the Old Man’s Office to check on the progress of the restoration of the car.

“I refuse to repair a car if the owner refuses to look at it!” he had warned so for the past few months Hubby Dear had to find time to look at the Old Girl.

Finally when the car came home it was returned to its pride of place and made the occasional round in the compound just to keep the engine going. Hubby Dear always recounted the words of Muchlowski, his old Polish friend ” Old cars are like women, they have to be used regularly to be kept in good shape!”

So after several months of going round the compound, we realised that the Insurance policy of the Old Girl had expired . I hunted out the number of the agent who has since retired and also fought with his heir and successor and refused to give me his co-ordinates. I was in a fix. The only other Insurance agent I knew of was Chandu who Anna Shetty is convinced has addled brains (a fact quite likely considering he juggles two legitimate families one in Mumbai and the other in Jalgaon) and who handles our Medical Insurance.

I called the next best option TATA AIG who handles the insurance of my car. The lady at the other end was very helpful considering she was somewhere in Gurgaon or Chennai (call centres are somehow never in Mumbai) and told me that since the car was more than 10 years old it couldn’t technically be insured but still if I insisted I would have to contact their office in either Bandra, Navi Mumbai or Bhayaindar. And what was worse, I’d have to take the car there for inspection before a decision was taken to “award” the insurance. Obviously this person had no idea about places or distances in Mumbai. Nor did she have any idea of Hubby Dear’s bifurcation of the world as Mumbai and North India (which begins from Worli just a few kilometres north of our house) and his deep reservations of shaking hands with anyone remotely North of the Vindhyas.

Unsure of what to do next, I was happy when our resourceful driver unearthed an old policy so I called up New India Assurance to make an appointment. This morning I went to the Opera House branch where I was stopped at the gate by a watchman who wanted to know my business. When I explained what I wanted he told me to go to the Cooperage Branch from where the policy was issued.

Luckily the traffic wasn’t half as bad as it normally is and I made it to the office in a good mood. Seeing one lift closed for refurbishment and the rickety state of the other, I was apprehensive about how the meeting would go. Sure enough, I got out on the floor indicated by the watchman below and went into an office which had no sign of a Reception. I walked up to the desk closest to the door and thrust the policy in the agent’s face. He seemed to have no idea of what could be done but luckily an agent across the room heard the conversation and suggested I get in touch with X. After repeating my story for the fourth time now I explained to X my problem
- The insurance policy had expired or was going to expire
- I had no idea where the current policy was
- My current agent refused to insure the car as he had retired
- My current agent refused to give me the telephone number of his son who had inherited the business claiming him to be an incompetent ass
- I still needed to insure the car
Luckily X turned out to be smarter and more co-operative than his deadpan look and he heeded to my suggestion that he search for my existing policy in the “system”. Luckily too the system wasn’t down, the electricity was up and running and my policy showed up withing seconds on the screen!

But then X told me that he couldn’t insure the car nor could any one else in this Branch as they were not authorised to issue Third Party Insurance policies and that the only person who could help me was my old (original) Insurance Agent! This left me back on Square One – A car with no insurance and no agent to insure it.

The Chill Pill prescribed by my shrink seems to be working because I actually held my cool and fluttered my eyelashes which were actually fluttering because of my massive headache. Acting the helpless damsel I asked X to call up the agent since I didn’t have his number. He seemed to be in a mood to oblige and actually did! And wonder of wonders, the agent who was the nincompoop son actually came on the line and spoke to me.

He asked me to leave a check with X which would be couriered to him, promised to send a surveyor to inspect the car ( apparently many people insure cars that don’t exist and then claim the policy!!!) and also send the Insurance Policy to my home by post.

It seems that my tactics worked and within four days my trusty old Fiat will be insured and I can continue taking it for rounds in the compound without fear of being sued for running down a dog or cat!

p.s. If you do want to insure your car you could call Salil Bhave 9987090797
Murderous nanny

October 26, 2012
After a long time I’m actually staying at home this morning. Of course I am not doing anything much which often leaves people conjuring images of me swinging from a fan like an Orang Utan or lounging on a deck chair like Cleopatra being fed grapes by my willing slave. Alas! No such luck. I have to actually sit down in front of the computer and review and edit my cook book one last time. So while I was editing the manuscript , calling up the printer to make sure he delivers the copies of a book planned to be released on Sunday at our annual Charity celebration, co-ordinating with my suppliers and clients and also planning yet another family celebration next month, I decided to take a Net surfing break. I don’t know how I landed up on “The New York Times” because I don’t generally read the news at all but what I read shocked me out of my mind.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading – in a country where everything is checked, cross checked and referenced to the point of no surprise skeletons, how could a nanny’s murderous intentions go un-noticed? That apart, I realised how fragile our social fabric has become. Any incident can unhinge a person and any action of such a person can go un-punished on grounds of insanity. It is simply absurd. I think we have to re-think our rules of punishment and invoke that old law of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth“.

As a mother I can hardly begin to imagine the shock of seeing young children dead – so brutally stabbed by the person who you entrusted with their care. My heart goes out to the young mother and know that no words will ever heal her heart. But this is a risk all mothers have to take as pursuing a career means leaving your children in the care of others. In India and many other Asian countries, grandparents happily pitch in and I know of families that have been brought up by granny while the young parents go off to work. Walking down the streets in Shanghai I could see many children brought out to play by older people. In Europe too there are families who share the burden of child rearing with each granny baby sitting for a day or two, giving the young mother a chance to keep on working. But in a society like the US which doesn’t want to have anything to do with their parents apart from the occasional card and family dinner, it doesn’t come as a surprise that child care is in the hands of total strangers. This does not mean that the children deserve to die nor does it mean that in the care of grandparents/uncles and aunts don die either, but a child who is brought up by the grandparents has a better chance of being cared for in a more loving and responsible way.

Women have a difficult choice to make – to work or not. Very often the need to work over rides the choice of not working and in today’s world a woman’s identity is distinct. She is no longer a daughter, a sister, a wife or a mother. She is herself, working for herself, achieving her own dreams and living her own life.

Many Indian immigrants still call their parents over for six months at a stretch to do Nanny Duty but with Indian parents now getting used to the “Empty Nest Syndrome”, an increased reluctant to live and work in an alien land, with more stringent checks for getting visas and the high cost of health insurance there are fewer grannies willing to be nannies.

With less people willing to go into service jobs, with grandparents unwilling to become caregivers it will become even harder for young women to have careers………..

Truly I am glad I didn’t have to make the choice and leave my children in the care of a murderous nanny. Those days were tough when all my friends were pursuing careers, I was sitting at home washing nappies, folding clothes and running after two young toddlers barely eighteen months apart. Sometimes I wonder how my life would have been if I had pursued a career and followed my dream.

But then when I read stories like this I am glad I did what I did.
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When Truth becomes stranger than Fiction

October 25, 2012

I first read George Orwell‘s futuristic novel “Nineteen Eighty Four” when I was all of fourteen. At that age, 1984 seemed as far away as his idea that Big Brother was watching. I honestly thought that the world would end in 1999 ( when I was 14) and couldn’t bring myself to say 2000 or even 2001.

The whole concept of a world with strict supervision, with structures so rigid seemed so weird especially in the days of free love and Flower Power. The drab world of George Orwell and that other prophet of doom Ayn Rand seemed improbable in the bright psychedelic world of the ’60s.

But today I find this is ironically true. There is a Big Brother following our every move. There is a Cyber Power that knows our every detail right down to the size of our underwear and the toothpaste we are currently using.

With governments getting increasingly paranoid and insisting on fingerprinting, iris mapping and god alone knows what to keep track of people there is a very fine line between privacy and public property. Facebook, Peekyou, Linkd In and many other social networking sites make it hard to keep one’s movements and identity a secret.

It is amazing how many dirty secrets are uncovered by simply typing in a name. For instance today when I typed in a name, I was shocked to find out the different addresses where the person was purported to have resided.And to imagine that for years I had assumed she was staying at the place I was sending her mail to! Obviously she was leading me a merry dance, keeping me happy in my ignorance, leading her own secret life while I imagined her to be lonely and struggling, working hard in an alien land.

But Big Brother has its advantages in a way: with social networks invading private space and the knowledge that nothing can be kept secret anymore may just promote a certain level of honesty and ethical behaviour.

Yet on the other hand, it may make people even more devious and cunning.

Big Brother will have to watch and see……….