The Fifth Gear

Apart from an affinity for the Need for Speed series of computer games and the sport of Go-Karting, I have no major love for driving cars. As far as possible, I prefer to take the motorbike rather than the car. Still, when I dropped my brother at the railway station late in the night, driving a slalom through the speed blocks on chennai's arterial roads, I couldn't help but enjoy the experience. I guess my aversion is to traffic, rather than to driving cars as such. On a motorbike I can whizz through the choking metropolitan traffic with impunity. On the other hand, driving a mile-wide car under the same conditions invariably has me crawling along the road with 10 near-heart-attacks a minute thanks to reckless drivers. My Dad's solemn advice of "While driving, assume that every other person on the road is mad," is probably the only thing that has kept our car dent-free while I am at the wheel.

So, unused to having an empty road in front of me, I'm still driving at a sedate pace, and my impatient brother asks, "Why don't you shift to the fifth gear?"

I paused, and muttered, "Oh... does this car have a fifth gear?" even though I knew that he knew that I knew that every car these days has a fifth gear, leave alone our own. For heaven's sake, I'm a mechanical engineer. So, for the first time in the four years that I've known how to drive a car, I shifted to the fifth gear.

On the way back, I wondered why I've never shifted to the fifth gear on the occasions that I've had the good fortune of being able to drive above 50kmph within the city. One reason is that I was only taught upto the fourth gear at the driving school, because those ancient Maruti 800s had only four gears. Ok, that's a really dumb reason. The other, equally - dumb - but - nevertheless - true, reason is simply that I've never done it before.

So, while I was musing over the fact that I've finally used the fifth gear (even though I've had the opportunity for four years) after my brother pointed it out to me, the strength of the allegory hit me. The beauty of the metaphor deserves this blog post. How often in life have we not tried something just because we've never done it before? How many times have we under-performed or failed because of an illogical resistance to change? Until somebody points out to us in the correct manner that something can be done better, there is a tendency to stay rooted in mediocrity under the pretext of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

So, go on. Try something new today. Maybe it will put your life into fifth gear.

Cheers,
Prashanth.