THE SUV AS METAPHOR

These days roads in our cities increasingly witness men driving around in oversized SUVs. I don’t know the names of all these SUVs but I know the names of some.  Toyota Fortuner seems to be the most preferred of these road monsters, but there are others like Ford Endeavour, Tata Harrier, Mahindra XUV and a host of others. The majority of SUVs tend to be white, followed by black. These are manly colours, you see. Who wants an SUV to be bright red or bright yellow? Red and yellow are sissyish colours. The drivers of these SUVs evidently want to pass off as VIPs, which by no stretch they really are, and besides, the idea of anyone being a VIP, including our clownish politicians, is itself a joke. LOL. What are their credentials, one is tempted to ask. Ninety per cent of India’s politicians have criminal cases registered against them, as a recent survey by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) has shown.

Given their size, the SUVs are most unsuited for Indian roads, what with the traffic, the potholes, the road-rage, the accidents and the overall mayhem. Yet men will buy them and drive them. Of course, they don’t buy them with their own money, as the SUVs cost a bomb. They buy them with borrowed money, borrowed from banks that are only too willing to trap them in debt traps when the men in question fail to repay even a single EMI on time. Then bouncers arrive at their door and threaten them with murderous violence if their dues aren’t cleared. And the men have no option but to capitulate. What they probably do is take a second loan to clear their first loan, and a third loan to clear their second loan. The cycle is endless.

When they buy their SUVs, however, these grown men who have failed to grow out of their childhood do not pause to consider if they’ll be able to repay their loans. Dekha jaayega, they tell themselves, as wishful thinking Indians are wont to. We’ll figure it out when the time comes. When we don’t plan our families, where’s the question of planning our finances. God is great.

Instead of pausing and asking themselves why an SUV and not a hatchback will serve their purpose, these men instead go on to fit accessories to their cars. These include dark black sun control film, as well as fancy licence plates with extremely tiny lettering, both of which make it possible for them to flee a hit-and-run accident site with ease. Accidents, by the way, invariably happen, because what’s the point in spending a fortune to buy a Fortuner if one cannot drive it at 300 kilometres per hour, way faster than our Vande Bharat Express trains? Not just that. The blokes spend up to a lakh sometimes to buy what are called VIP numbers. What they want the world to see is that they’ve made it, now that they are driving a white SUV with black tinted glass, and licence plates in clear violation of RTO rules, and VIP numbers like 1 or 9999. They have gotten entitled. No one can harm them.

But don’t women drive SUVs my readers might want to ask me. Of course they do, but then these are women who wish to assume a masculine persona, like, say Prime Minister Indira Gandhi or Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher, or Rekha in the film Khoon Bhari Maang. In truth, they are even more potentially dangerous behind the wheel of their gargantuan SUVs than their male counterparts, given the clumsy way in which they drive.  We believe in gender equality they mean to say, which itself is a laughable proposition in patriarchal India, what with the majority of our heterosexual men being misogynistic male chauvinist pigs who regard toxic masculinity as a virtue rather than a vice.

My real purpose in writing this blog, however, is to investigate if the SUV is a metaphor for something. I believe it is. I believe the SUV is a metaphor for raw phallic power. Apart from everything else that men who drive the white SUVs wish to say, they also want to tell the world that they have oversized genitals that can sustain erections for an endless amount of time. No man can give as much pleasure to a straight woman as they can. This is what they are really telling us, isn’t it, when they honk and overtake us from the left, and splash dirty water on us in the rainy season, and even beat us up if we fail to clear the way for them? My dick is bigger and harder than yours, and so I’m more equal than you, I have the right of way, and that’s the plain truth. If you drive a hatchback it sure means that you have equipment that is no match to mine.

Really?

Many sexologists I have spoken to have affirmed that more than any other race, it is Indians who suffer from serious erectile dysfunction. They fail to get it up when they have to. They are impotent. The white SUV then becomes an alibi to cover up an inadequacy. My car will help me achieve the orgasm that my male organ cannot.

Now let us see who are complicit in feeding the metaphor? To start with, automobile manufacturers are complicit for needlessly introducing newer and newer SUVs in the market? For what? For enhanced profit. Banks are complicit for doling out easy loans to infantile men to buy their SUVs. For what? For revenue in the form of interest on the loans. The RTO is complicit in selling VIP numbers to the gullible for five and six figure amounts. For what? For money. The RTO is also complicit in allowing unscrupulous drivers to drive around with illegal licence plates, and then charging them hefty fines when captured on camera. For what? For money again. And finally, the government is complicit. What better way to fool the world that India is a rich developed country than to show that our roads are full of high-end top-of-the-line SUVs manufactured by leading automobile companies? Hum kisise kum nahin. Optics, after all, are everything.