This was also, in many cases, our first exposure to the non-English speaking school of thought and perception building. India, and Indians in India, were still largely enamoured by things which originated from England – including colonialism and Western feudalism – and to some extent, North America. The fine folk from the USSR were just about entering our sub-conscious, and sub-Continent, and Europe was still a large mystery, as well as European work habits - where the whole concept of people working with their own hands and really placing the dignity of labour ahead of many other things - were new to us.

One of the big differences between the western (American) free style economies and the eastern bloc soviet style economies, however, was in the number, size and quality of private cars. The Western European economies were awash with constantly evolving designs – leading to powerful and reliable vehicles. Luxury was still a quality associated with huge American limos. The Eastern bloc however seemed to have road transport technologies frozen in time around WWII, and there were far more trucks, buses, as well as quasi-public transport vehicles around.

To give you an example - stores and supplies for our ships would usually arrive in pick-up trucks or closed body vans. These were fairly similar to each other, regardless of East or West – basic vehicles with heating for the winters. Visiting tradesmen or those who would service or repair equipment on our ships, however, would come on foot or bicycle in the Eastern European Soviet bloc countries, but would come in their own cars in the Western European countries. And in the major ports of Europe - West Germany, Belgium, Holland - that usually meant in a Mercedes Benz car. The French were on a different planet, as far as their cars were concerned, and the Italians were busy changing governments like underwear, while Fiat was the status quo there.

This was intensely surprising to us Indians. The then newly prevailing Mercedes Benz cars, also known as the W114/W115 chassis, with model numbers like 200, 220, 230, 240 and 250, were considered close to the ultimate in luxury in many parts of the world then, including in India. Certainly, there were also the ‘Pagoda,’ the SL, and other series - but Merc meant a luxury car to us, regardless. These were also the early cars without tail fins, so, as far as design went, they were revolutionary. Post WWII, it would be fair to say that these were the first totally new cars, and technologically supreme.

And then, as an aspirational teenager, dreaming of buying his first Merc, to learn that the reason they sold well in Western Europe was more because they were reliable beasts of burden, equally at home doing duty as taxies operating dual and triple shifts 7 days a week, durable and tough - that was education. I distinctly recall an elderly crane-hydraulics technician coming onboard in Hamburg, showing me how he had almost a tonne of tools and parts in the rear of his Merc, and suitcases full of clothes and overalls on the rear seat. His otherwise spotless car had already done about 300,000 kilometres in all kinds of weather and over all types of roads - as he travelled all over European ports attending to ships. The engine was on song at any speed, and when he let me drive it, I simply couldn’t feel the load in the back. And then he told me – over beer, sausages and potatoes, staple diet at the time – how, in his opinion, he would change the car only when he completed about 500,000 kilometres – that would be when the car was just about 4 years old. In that much time, he expected that the car would give him stable service – i.e. nil downtime, and that was enough for him. The rest was perhaps jam on the basic bread and butter – and a star on the bonnet.

Two-car families were not the norm then, so when he was back home, the Merc doubled up as the family buggy too. But its primary role made it the most important tool for his trade. And for decades after that, when I saw a Merc, I first thought ‘reliable’ and only after that ‘luxury.’ And I also saw how a nation of industrious people whom I admired, and still do, was made from the bottom-up by technical people who had access to reliable transportation – built by workers driving reliable German cars – to the side of which they simply tied camping equipment if a hotel room was not in their budget.



Fast forward to the 90s, a period in the history of Mercedes Benz when worldwide issues on quality and reliability were not just making headlines, but also placing them on the bottom of the rung as far as many things motoring were concerned. And that coincided with a time and place in history when Mercedes Benz, Daimler-Chrysler, or equivalents, chose to start manufacturing cars in India. Wearing dark suits and a Hanseatic attitude so thick that even if they sold us garbage with a 3-pointed star on it, we would have swallowed it in India, which we did. Some of the earlier Mercs sold in India were rubbish – till competition landed up to improve the party.

But all they kept stressing on in India was ‘luxury’ – while the Japanese, and then the Koreans, and now the Indians with Tata, first concentrated on getting the ‘reliability’ matrix up and running. Somewhere, durability went out the window as a preferred substance, but I guess we will come to that again, soon!

So there I was, decades later, at the Mercedes SLS AMG launch in Delhi. About a dozen of these super cars, up for grabs at 2.5 crores and more in taxes, duties and sundries, all pre-sold – with a waiting list of about 8-10 months. The accompanying booklet, all 84 pages of it, itself a thing of beauty - half-a-dozen of which I quietly picked up to keep as souvenirs, and for passing on to youngsters equally enamoured by the 3-pointed star as I was almost half-a-century ago.

The launch and subsequent press conference was all about the car and its features. Words like maximum horsepower, profile of buyers, technology used, space-age this, cockpit that – at some stage it began to sound as though we were being informed of an expensive piece of jewellery on wheels. Lady GaGa couldn’t have done better if she came on stage dressed in nothing but gull-wing doors made of transparent teflon.

Meanwhile, hanging around, looking bemused (I get to see and play with my supercars on family and work trips to London and San Francisco – two world cities where nothing is unavailable for closer inspection if you wish it to be so) I spotted my moment of the decade – almost as poignant a revelation as the plumbers and electricians observed almost 30-40 years ago. There was Dr. Wilfried Aulbur of Mercedes Benz India, presenting us with the ultimate in luxury from Mercedes-Benz, down on his knees like an eager groom. Dressed in a pair of what we would call ‘smart casuals,’ but I would re-define as plumber-chic - rumpled slacks and a t-shirt, selling an expensive luxury car, in India. Where even small town car dealers wear rocks on their shirts the size of marbles, here was Germany making a statement.