All We Know Is, We Called Him The Stig.

DISCLAIMER: I wrote this post a while ago and since then the Top Gear Trio and head producer signed a deal with Amazon to make their own TV Show which I can’t wait to see. In the meantime though…

There is a palpable sense of loss when something you know, love, have come to appreciate, admire and respect is suddenly and ruthlessly taken away from you in a blink of an eye. Gone, zilch, kaputz, sayonara. That sense hit home when with a swing of his fist in a fit of immature and apish aggression a man better known as “the orangutan” sent the most widely watched factual television program in the world, and my guilty pleasure, careening off the road over a cliff and into a massive fireball from which there was no recovery. The show that made every petrolhead’s wildest and zaniest dreams come true was totaled.

To say that I liked Top Gear would be an understatement. I didn’t just watch Top Gear once, have a good laugh and then move onto the next show. I watched all 22 seasons……. THREE times, back to back to back during college. I watched it before going to bed, while cooking, while doing homework, while studying, pretty much whenever I wasn’t sleeping.

There are a variety factors that could have led Mr. Clarkson to punch producer Oisin Tymon in the face, from the less than ideal filming conditions to the sub par plate of cold cuts he was served for dinner. However the fact of the matter is that Jeremey Clarkson broke the playground rule everyone’s mother tells them when they are growing up; use your words not your fists.

While the punch alone was not the knockout blow for the show, Clarkson’s eventual sacking because of the incident and Hammond and May’s refusal to resign with the BBC spells the end of Top Gear as we know it, for without the trio of Clarkson, Hammond, and May there is no Top Gear. The show had worked for 22 seasons because of the natural and unbridled chemistry between the three presenters. If someone could bottle that chemistry and reproduce it, they would strike television gold. Each season their antics would grow, thanks largely in part to the show’s budget which grew exponentially. Before you knew it they were racing a Bugatti Veyron against the Royal Air Force and driving to the North Pole in a Toyota pickup truck.

Those days are now gone and only the top brass at the BBC knows what the future holds for the new Top Gear. As for our beloved trio, yes the jokes were starting to get a little stale, the competition between the three a bit more predictable, and short of driving through North Korea, the world was running out of roads for them to leave their tire marks on. None the less I will always miss settling down on a Sunday evening to watch the latest episode of that pokey little motoring show on BBC2. As James May would say:

Baby Krishna and Marty McFly

With this being the 30th anniversary of Back to the Future, I thought I would talk about my experience with time travel.

 Last weekend I saw my life flash before my eyes. This wasn’t caused by a near death experience; it wasn’t my past that appeared before me for a few seconds and then vanished. I saw my future playing out in front of me. Here’s the kicker. It was the same as my past. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

In America, Americans celebrate their culture by barbecuing American beef while drinking American beer with Nascar on in the background. In America, Indians celebrate their culture by renting out a high school, strapping on their Apple Watches, cracking out their Indian traditional clothing, and watching their families sing and dance for a few hours on stage then by mingling and talking about algorithms and curry spices while India’s version of Spotify called Saavn blasts in the background. For those of you who are having trouble visualizing it:

The men think they look like this.

The women think they look like this….

Growing up there were many weekends spent in similar gatherings celebrating the birthday or existence of one of the 330 million gods we are blessed to have in Hinduism. Except back in those days instead of Apple Watches it was the latest Blackberry and instead of renting out a high school it was the local park. Countless hours were spent in interminable boredom watching my siblings dance and sing and thinking “my parents said it was a birthday celebration; that means there is cake at the end right ?” and then being disappointed to find out it wasn’t that kind of birthday party. According to my parents, god was too old for cake. Don’t get me wrong, I love my culture but when you are five years old its hard to stay engaged. When I got to high-school my siblings were too old and my parents too busy to go to such events anymore and my memories of dressing up as baby Krishna once a year began to fade……. until a few weeks ago.

A very good friend of mine was performing in a cultural event celebrating, you guessed it, a god. Being the awesome friend that I am, I went to go watch and support her at the local rented out high-school with one of my buddies who funnily enough decided to wear his Apple watch for the occasion. Being Indian, the performance didn’t start on time, so instead of getting there right at the perfect moment to watch our friend dance and then dip, we got to sit through an hour of Indian song and dance.

That’s when it all began, the flashes. It all seemed so familiar, like I had been here before. Next to me there was a grown man wearing an Apple Watch in full Shah Rukh Khan ( look up it’s the guy on the right)  form shaking his hips like Shakira and cheering like a 12 year old at a Beiber concert while his wife got her 15 seconds of fame onstage dancing to classic Bollywood songs. I turned to my buddy and said, “Bro, is this going to be us in 30 years ?” he stifled a laugh, turned to me and said “Shit bro, it’s looking like it”. I turned back to the stage as the dance came to an end and the man next to me started whooping and shouting “One more time, one more time!”