An interesting bit of information is displayed on a standee kept next to The Very First Volvo in the World of Volvo, in Gothenburg. It points out that the premier of ÖV4, in the 1920s, fell flat because a rear axle gear had been installed incorrectly and the car could only drive in reverse in its first test drive. Embarrassment caused by the event to the company notwithstanding, Volvo identified the fault and immediately fixed it. Then onwards, the Volvo cars and trucks have had the reverse gears; but Volvo, the automobile giant, has only moved forward. It has gracefully covered the long distance to world leadership in automobile sector.
World of Volvo
Before talking further about Volvo culture, here is a less known fact about the reverse gear—it is the most powerful gear in all automobiles. Once, while on a 3,700-mile road trip from Paris to Ankara, Dominique Lapierre, and his classmate, Dominique Frémy, was faced with a steep climb near Athens, which brought their 6-HP antique Amilcar to its knees. To deal with the challenge, they turned around the car and drove uphill in reverse gear. The effect was miraculous: their valiant car climbed the slope like a Tour de France bicycle.
There is much to learn from Volvo’s culture of acknowledging shortcomings, working on them to improve, and above all, talking candidly about the failure. The power of the reverse gear also has a message.
Managing personal life; running a corporation or a government—each is akin to driving a vehicle. If a not-so-correct decision is taken and implemented, it would only be appropriate to acknowledge it gracefully, in time, like Volvo, and to get into the powerful reverse gear to prevent appreciable damage.
Like the reverse gear, the brakes and the rear-view mirrors also contribute to good driving. The purpose of brakes—more important than the ability to slow down and stop at will—is to allow driving at high speeds. Awareness of functional brakes, or ‘brake consciousness’ as it may be called, sets one free to speed up.
Amusingly, the purpose of the rear-view mirrors installed in the cars of the yesteryears was to enable the drivers to keep an eye on the cops who might be chasing them. Today, they have a more meaningful purpose—to ensure road safety.
Cruising ahead in life; or leading an organisation, it pays to look into the rear view mirror and observe the road travelled. Slowing down to take stock, or getting into reverse gear to make amends are empowering options.
Willingness to adopt the goodness of Volvo Culture is the need of the hour.
The man arranged my bags in the boot of his taxi and opened the door with a smile for me to occupy the rear seat. That was his routine, and he followed it mechanically, I guess, with everyone. He was visibly surprised when I politely declined his suggestion and sought his okay to sit by his side. Sitting in the front seat satiates the desire of the child in me to look out and see places through the windscreen. Besides, chatting with a local gives me a peep into the life and culture of a people I know less about. This was my fourth landing in Gothenburg. On all the earlier occasions I had been received and escorted from the airport by one of my family. This time, I was alone.
I found it strange that the cab driver wasn’t familiar with the address I wanted him to take me to. As a matter of habit, which my children consider silly, I compared the state of affairs with India where taxi drivers know the locations by heart. They download the local maps into their heads and are capable of driving a guest through the narrow lanes literally blindfolded. At peak hours, they know better than Google does, the best route for fast mobility. With a little struggle, he energised the Google Map on his tablet. “You want to go here?” He placed his rugged finger on the screen to confirm the location.
Even as I nodded an affirmation, my knowledge of body language and accent indicated that in all probability he was an immigrant; not a Swede by birth. It didn’t really matter to me. Or, did it?
“From the front seat I will be able to truly appreciate the beauty of your city,” I initiated a meaningless conversation as I strapped up by his side.
“You tourist? First visiting to Gothenburg?” His pronunciation, economy and choice of words, and flawed English led me to doubt if he was of European descent either. Just for academic interest I wanted to establish his roots. And, I wished to do it without asking him. Back home, in India I take pride in identifying the domicile (state or the region) of a person with 60 to 70 precent accuracy, after conversing with the individual for a few minutes. Now I was anxious to test my ability in Sweden.
“An Arab?” I thought as I began narrowing down my search. “This is my fourth trip to Gothenburg… I am visiting my children,” I opened up.
“They is working here,” he asked.
“They are researchers,” I replied as I fished for more clues about him.
“You from India…? Hindoostan?” He stumped me with that question. He turned out to be a master of the art I was trying to learn. And then, when I smiled, he took off, “I am Afran Ahmed (name changed). I am from Iraq.” With that declaration, he took away my chance to complete my discovery and feel elated. “I like Indian films… Amitabh Bachchan… Shahrukh Khan….” A glow swept his face.
For me, Iraq refreshed the memory of the Iran-Iraq War; Saddam Hussein, the Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini; the Israeli raid on the Osirak nuclear facility; the Gulf War; George W Bush and the Weapons of Mass Destruction; the hanging of Saddam Hussein and other recent happenings in and around Iraq. In the decades gone by, I had either watched the news of those events on the television, or read about them extensively to sharpen my knowledge to pass promotion examinations while in the Air Force. The last names that came to mind were Tikrit and Mosul—the regions made infamous by the ISIS. I admit that the recent history of Iraq churning in my mind was somehow eroding my interest in him.
“So, how long have you been driving in Sweden?”
“Few years… before that I do work for VOLVO… about 20 years,” he said proudly.
I have a high opinion of the automobile giant, VOLVO. Visiting ‘The World of VOLVO,’ the recently commissioned VOLVO Museum, in Gothenburg was in my itinerary. A man who had worked for VOLVO for two decades must have had something in him. It was his mettle I was not privy to. I held him in high esteem for a brief while until Iran-Iraq War, Gulf War, Saddam Hussain… returned to my mind.
“What were you doing before coming to Sweden?”
“Many years I play for Iraq football team. Once I play friendly match in Bombay,” his eyes lit up like little LEDs and searched the horizon excitedly for the Indian city. I love the game; and I adore football players. My interest in him, which was sliding down, braked momentarily. My reverence for him rose until the thoughts of Mosul, Tikrit and ISIS crawled in again.
He continued enthusiastically. My occasional “Unh” and “Oh, I see” kept recharging him. He was grateful to the Swedish government for having accepted him. By the time I was ready to disembark, I had come to know a lot more about him and his family. His daughter was studying medicine and with the grace of Allah, his son would be an engineer someday. In the time I spent with him, he had presented me with a waft of his life. He was a contended man — a rare species in today’s world.
He did not tell me why he had left Iraq. Was he persecuted? May be. May be not. I thought it impolite to probe. He was sad about his once prosperous country being ravaged by wars and internal disturbances.
Anjali, my daughter-in-law, and Maya, my granddaughter was approaching the parking area when our cab rolled in. Suddenly, I was in a hurry to be with them. A problem with the payment using my International Debit Card caused a last-minute hiccup. Afran handed me the swipe machine to swipe the card myself. I tried, and succeeded. Afran enquired if I wanted a receipt. I always decline a printed receipt, but in this instance, I wanted to retain it as a souvenir, so I requested him to print one. Afran obliged me with a copy and drove off cheerfully. In a minute after his cab turned the first corner, I deposited the Iraqi into a far corner of my memory—to be retrieved if, and when required.
I relished the delicious food prepared by Anjali and tried to decipher Maya’s gibberish at the dinner table. It was still broad daylight at about 10 pm when we closed our plates. Days are long in Sweden at this time of the year (July). It was time to reset my biological clock and get used to the long daylight hours.
My flight from Delhi to Gothenburg, with a two-hour layover in Helsinki, had been very tiring. I had been up for nearly fifteen hours; had not slept except for a few winks here and there. I was expecting to experience a jet lag and was preparing to crash when panic struck. While unpacking my bags I realised that my wallet was missing. I remembered taking out my debit card from it to pay the cab fare. Then, in a hurry, I had kept back the card in the front pocket of my shirt. What about the wallet? Where could I have kept it, if not back in my waist pouch or my hip pocket? Maybe I had dropped it in the cab or on the way from the parking area to my son’s flat. It contained some cash, my debit cards and identity cards. If not recovered, I’d have to block them. My worry was that, having never done it before, I wasn’t familiar with the procedure to de-activate cards. The need to recall the consumer numbers, user ids, and passwords was making me feel sick — reproducing those details accurately would entail a lot of scratching of my bald head.
I was sad that the loss of my wallet was going to dent, in some ways, my endeavour to feel the pulse of the people and places I was going to visit during my excursion, which had hardly begun.
…feeling the pulse of a people and place
As a first step, Anjali and I walked back to the spot where I had left the cab. We scanned the path for the wallet. But there was no trace of it. Possibly I had left it on the seat in the cab or dropped it on the floor of the vehicle. God alone, or that driver must have known where my wallet was. I was harbouring no illusions about finding it because I did not have the cabbie’s contact details. I couldn’t picture him going out of his way to trace me to return the wallet. At best, he might deposit it in some lost and found depository, I thought.
“Why would someone go out of his way to connect with a stranger?”
“Afran… Iraq, Gulf War, Saddam Hussein, Tikrit, ISIS….,” I was sinking slowly into the quicksand of negativity when Anjali came up with a suggestion, “Dad, give me the receipt. It’ll surely have the details of the driver and the cab company.”
To our good luck, it bore the name of the cab company.
Anjali called the company’s helpline. Given the transaction id and the name of the driver, the mobile number of the individual and the trip details could be traced. For some reasons, Afran did not, or could not, respond to the cab agency’s phone calls raising my anxiety by a few notches. Within me, I was cursing the habit of people turning off their phones after work hours.
“Gulf War, weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein, ISIS, Tikrit, ….”
The car rental company’s representative shared Afran’s number with us. After a while, when he could be contacted, Afran confirmed that my wallet was left in his cab; it was safe with him. I had dropped it on the floor of the car. He said that it could be collected from him from a central place in Gothenburg the next day.
Anjali collected my wallet from Afran the next afternoon and conveyed grateful thanks to him. The contents were intact. The time since I arrived in Gothenburg had flown so fast that I had not had an opportunity to go through the messages on my mobile phone and my emails. Relieved of the immediate tension, I sifted through my unread messages. There was one from an unfamiliar Sweden number. It read, “Hi, this is Afran Ahmed.” It was delivered to me at 10:37 pm (local time) the previous evening, around the time we were trying to connect with Afran. He had perhaps got my number from my visiting card kept in my wallet and was trying to contact me to let me know that I had left behind my wallet. If I had read that message and had spoken with Afran instantly, I wouldn’t have cluttered my mind so much.
A different Iraq
At peace. I revisited Iraq. This time, I could effortlessly wade past the ISIS, the Gulf War and a country in ruins — to a once-prosperous civilisation between the Tigris and the Euphrates. I recalled the fascinating history of Mesopotamia and its rich and varied heritage. One of the oldest civilisations in the world; the birth place of cuneiform writing and recorded history… and much more.
The Mesopotamian I met that day left me a lesson — to savour the true vibrant colours of this beautiful world, one must see it without tinted glasses.
In a month into the excursion, I would meet a Pakistani — the one and only person of that nationality, I have ever interacted with. He’d leave another indelible memory, and a small debt, which, I doubt, I’d ever have an opportunity to repay. That story… another day, another time.
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Air Commodore Anil Kumar Benipuri (Veteran) : This is also called the Stockholm Syndrome. 🤣🤣
Road Much Travelled 