Most people think driving is about getting somewhere. I don’t. I think driving is about meeting ourselves. Perhaps that is the emotional side of driving we rarely talk about.
A Room That Moves
Conversations That Happen on the Road
Think about the most important conversations of your life. One of them was probably with your father, discussing life with you. Or with a close friend, somewhere on a long drive. Or with your spouse, on the way home after an argument, when neither of you wanted to speak first. Or with your child, for whom, asking a question that was easier to voice from the back seat than across the dinner table.
Somehow, a moving car makes difficult conversations easier. Perhaps it’s because no one has to look at each other. Everyone is looking at the road.
In Reflections Through the Windscreen, I called a car “a room that moves.” The more I drive, the more I believe it. Outside, people are rushing, overtaking, honking, trying to get somewhere. Inside, we have the rare luxury of simply being with our thoughts with no meetings, no notifications, no demands. Just the road ahead, and the quiet company of ourselves.
Perhaps that is why a car can become more than a means of transport. It gives us a private space to experience the emotional side of driving – the memories, thoughts and conversations that surface along the way.
When the Road Brings Memories Back
I have often wondered why the same Jagjit Singh ghazal sounds ordinary at home but extraordinary during an evening drive. Why a red light sometimes becomes the most peaceful part of the day. Why we occasionally reach home, switch off the engine, and sit there for five minutes longer, as though stepping out would end something unfinished.
The road has a curious way of returning memories to us. Sometimes they arrive with a song. Sometimes with the smell of rain through a half-open window. Sometimes with the familiar curve of a highway we’ve driven a hundred times before. We think we are travelling through places. Often, we are travelling through memories.
Why We Name Our Cars
I have owned five cars, and people often ask why I gave each one a name. My answer is always the same: we don’t name machines, we name relationships.
Every car became part of a different chapter of my life. One taught me responsibility. Another taught me patience. One carried my family across thousands of kilometres. Another carried me through the hardest night of my life. As I wrote in the book — cars don’t remain machines. They carry what we do not say.
What the Road Teaches
The road teaches, but never through lectures. It teaches through moments.
A foggy highway, where I blindly followed another driver until he crashed. A lonely mountain road, where I learned that confidence and overconfidence are separated by exactly one bend. A crowded Delhi signal, where a rickshaw puller sat watching a sparrow hop along a wire while every other soul at that light stared straight ahead at the traffic — unbothered, unhurried, entirely somewhere else. The road never spoke. It simply waited for me to notice. Much of the emotional side of driving lies in these small, almost unnoticed moments.
That is why I never say I “conquered” a mountain. Nobody conquers a mountain. It remains exactly where it was. It is the driver who changes. Every time I return to the hills, one line from the book feels truer than the last time: *the road does not adjust for us — we adjust for the road.* I suspect life works much the same way.
The Nine-Minute Drive
The hardest drive I have ever taken lasted only nine minutes. I drove faster than I knew I could, and every second seemed to stretch. Yet there are three-hour drives that disappear almost unnoticed. Driving has a strange way of changing our relationship with time. When we are desperate to reach somewhere, minutes become heavy. When the road has our attention, hours can slip by without notice. Perhaps that is why driving can be deeply healing. It doesn’t change the time we have or the problems we carry. It changes how we experience them. Our hands stay busy, our eyes stay alert, and somewhere along the road, the mind begins to settle.
The Road Moves On
Perhaps that is the emotional side of driving. It isn’t found in speed, horsepower, or destinations. It lives in the conversations that could happen nowhere else. In songs that sound different through a windscreen. In mountains that make us humble. In machines that quietly become companions. In ordinary long drives that slowly shape extraordinary memories.
Every drive ends the same way. The engine falls silent. We lock the car and walk away. But if the journey has truly mattered, something never leaves us. Perhaps that is why we keep driving – not to escape life, but to understand it a little better.
As I wrote in the closing pages of Reflections Through the Windscreen
The road moves on.
The stories stay.