The Phantom Brake

Cant get enough of cabbies.. can I ?
Anyway, this is a common occurrence for me. As usual, I am in the cab, barrelling down the highway. This time, in the front seat. A couple of trucks are driving parallel to each other in the front. My cabbie has his eyes focussed, left hand firmly on the horn, right foot buried deep. 30..20...10 feet apart, yet there is seemingly no letdown in the acceleration. I curse under my breath and brace for impact. I slam my right foot hard into the carpet, as if slowing down was in my hands. After what seems like an eternity, my cabbie realises that there is now way he can drive through the truck and decides to slow down. I relax a bit and start breathing again. Slowly, ease my right foot off the imaginary brake. The Phantom Brake.

In another instance, we were once travelling in internal colony roads, early in the morning. Seeing the deserted roads, my driver had got into the highway-mode right in the city. The road was pretty twisty, full of blind turns. I started to get the familiar sensation of being hurled down something. As we approached each corner, I instinctively tensed up, since we were surely going too fast to corner safely. Each time we approached a twisty, I mashed my foot deep into the Phantom Brake, hoping to bring things back into control. I have lost count of the number of early morning joggers/dudhwallahs/compound walls we narrowly missed.

Curiously though, I have observed that none of my fellow passengers suffer from the Phantom Brake Syndrome. People are happily staring out of the window, listening to music, yapping on the phone or dozing. Do let me know if anyone of you also suffer from the same.....

Also, in my experience some of the best maintained cabs are also the worst driven. I actually feel safer in the older, more beaten up variety, since they tend to be driven carefully, lest some of the trim falls off. Many of the vehicles have a surprisingly high figure on their odo. I have been in a vehicle whose odometer read 2,65,000 kilometers, and thats when it had stopped working. Many of the fairly new vehicles also routinely have 1,00,000 kilometers.
One of my best cab experiences though, was in a white DLS model with red(ish) vinyl seats. It had 192,000 kilometers on the clock. And not a squeak or rattle to show it.