Whatever Floats Your Boat

Open roads or open waters? Expansive luxury or rousing performance? Joy Chaudhuri wonders if he is ready to make the move from car to boat.

The sky is grey and the incessant drizzle is keeping the Audi’s wipers busy. The road, gouged by the monsoon and the leviathans that carry the country’s industrial produce to Jawaharlal Nehru Port, is better suited for Audi’s Q7 rather than the A6 we are driving. The larger mountains, which they call speed breakers, need to be negotiated carefully, and calls for the A6 to crab its way over to prevent the underside from scraping. Despite the bad roads, the Audi is pretty comfortable, with the adaptive air suspension damping out the jarring thuds from the broken concrete. Under the hood is a 1,968cc engine that’s makes 190hp, which, at the moment, is good only for academic purposes as we crawl behind a 16-wheel trailer that’s belching out a cocktail of lethal gasses. As far as I can see, there is an unending stretch of red tail-lights.

The Arabian Sea on our right is choppy and the only sign of life is a small dinghy with an outboard motor puttering away in the distance. I wonder, is that a fisherman? At least he does not have to deal with traffic jams in the water. Though I am ensconced comfortably in a highend German sedan, I feel a pang of jealousy seeing the fisherman carving through the water in his boat. Would I trade places with him? Maybe, if the boat had a cabin as good as the A6 that I am in. That would include air conditioning and entertainment systems. And power, lots of it. That would be a cool way to travel around in a coastal city like Mumbai. Why isn’t it more popular? Since I am not driving and we are not going anywhere in a hurry I decide to use my time to Google the answer. And what I find is rather surprising.