Tryst with a tyre

There we were cruising above 100 kph the streo blaring some foot tapping numbers, me enjoying my McD 'chicken' burger almost in a trance and all of a sudden there was a small almost missed out 'thud' followed by a small burring sound. My first thought was that its some new song starting but then it continued and got out of tunhen our esteemed co-ordinator realised its a puncture. I had never imagined a puncture in a 20 lacs Skoda Laura with tubeless tyres and that too when it was running. As a general rule Tubeless tyres, when punctured go flat when they're still, not moving.

Its been raining mercilessly in Pune for the last fortnight or so and that fateful night was no different. Pranav did call his driver but he was on the other end of Pune and we being engineers suddenly had an itch to fix this issue at hand.

And the hunt started for the spare, found the spare and the tools,but that was just the easier part. Now starts the tamasha, the jack was in no way similar to what I had seen for a maruti or other small cars. We were all cranked to say the least. We all got down on the muddy road to figure out first where do we plug in the jack, that is if we ever manage to unscrew that thing. The 'Laura' is a huge car and has a huge base, mostly plastic, so I had to probe the underbelly near the tyre to find out a solid base. Till that time were all drenched and covered in mud too, looked like that kareena kapoor ad, when she was smeared in chocolate only difference being we were all in formals and weren't appealing in any sense of the imagination. That done we moved to unscrewing the jack, the instructions weren't helping. We put it under and did it, but as it turned out, we had done it upside down and as mentiones above we were all covered in what seemed like hot chocolate but was actually mud. My headache wasn't helping things.

Then more help arrived in the form of Mr Chaddi n Manish. We had realised this jack position was not correct as it wasn't very user friendly. Pawan took the lead and fixed it the other way and this time it worked but the spare tyre now decided to not help us. It was spotted rolling away from the car at some distance and Pranav had to sweat it out to catch up. There were a few more instances of pure absurdity like when we didnt' know where to find the screws for the radial and stuff. The 10 pointer gal in our team (read Snehal) came to our rescue there and left us all red faced.

There was more than one humbling experience that night and for a person like me who already has most of his ego leaked out had a tough time coping up.

But experiences are there to be recounted and pondered over and laughed at. I'm sure I'll recount this for atleast few more days to come coz its been a long time since I was marooned in the middle of nowhere and had shitloads of fun doing it.