7th July 2011, 10:19
| #16 | |
| BHPian Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: Chennai, India
Posts: 250
Thanked: 80 Times
| re: Sudha Car Museum, Hyderabad Had read about Sudha Cars but hadn't realized how varied and creative their collection was !. Quote:
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7th July 2011, 10:49
| #17 | |
| Distinguished - BHPian   | re: Sudha Car Museum, Hyderabad Quote:
 I hope he has the discarded bodyshell and other parts lying around his place somewhere...! | |
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8th July 2011, 13:37
| #18 |
| BANNED Join Date: Jun 2011 Location: Bangalore
Posts: 69
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8th July 2011, 21:35
| #19 |
| BHPian Join Date: Dec 2010 Location: Chennai/ KSA
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8th July 2011, 21:49
| #20 |
| BANNED Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: NAMMA BENGALURU
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| re: Sudha Car Museum, Hyderabad i had been there sometime back...  Mr Sudhakar is a very nice gentleman, and lots of passion. Took out his precious time to show me all his record breaking creations. Link: http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/travel...nalogue-2.html Nice to see, he's added more in all these years.... |
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9th July 2011, 09:07
| #21 |
| Senior - BHPian  | re: Sudha Car Museum, Hyderabad Though i don't have a taste for the novelty stuff based on cars, but I must say they are quite good at putting together a display of such stuff. They could have a massive future in replica /kit cars with all this talent. I hope they do get into that part of the business. |
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9th July 2011, 21:01
| #22 |
| Senior - BHPian  Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: Pune
Posts: 1,385
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| re: Sudha Car Museum, Hyderabad  This is a nice effort by Mr. Sudhakar and a nice musem. I think Mr. Sudhakar and his creations were featured on some TV show some years back. Overdrive or NDTV Car & Bike show; I don't remember. I particularly liked the Standard 10. Looks very neat. But whats the idea behind putting the plus sized tires on many vintage cars?  Also one of the cars seem to be fitted with Maruti 1000/Esteem wheels. |
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9th April 2015, 22:48
| #23 |
| BHPian  Join Date: Jan 2015 Location: Hyderabad
Posts: 72
Thanked: 179 Times
| Sudha Car Museum, Hyderabad This is not a straightforward post about the museum. It is an attempt to understand the range of memories that came to surface during my visit. My visit to the museum came at an important phase in my life – I was a newlywed at the time, and not for the first time that day I thought to myself how lucky I was to marry such a wonderful creature so full of life, a cloud of hope and optimism about her all the time. I, on the other hand, am a brooding type, wanting to be something special, thinking thoughts of doom, gloom and the end of everything. If you are wondering how a visit to the museum of cars finds a place in the context of my life, read on… Corporate strategies are complex, their finance books read like palimpsests with real words and meanings hiding under the pages and between the lines. I never pretend to understand them. But I am thankful that they are robust and impenetrable. I am also thankful that all the companies today can afford to bench people just so they don’t lose a project. I am thankful particularly because I was on bench and had the time to visit the museum. Just hope my manager is not reading this post… On one of those days when I was feeling rather encumbered, helpless, like a designated driver with an instruction sheet tacked on my windshield, all of my journey charted, turn by turn, I decided to visit an uncrowded place in the city. That is how I found myself standing outside the gates of Sudha Car Museum. It is right next to the main road so the usual drone of traffic was ringing in my ears. I parked my car and was heading to the ticket counter when I slowed down to get a sense of the place, its proportions, its magnetic illusions and its haunting intelligence…     From outside it looks like a madman’s idea of an amusement park, a plastic shark yawning to one side, a bike with an overly long handle, and a dog studying a frog’s corpse with utmost attention. I have learnt very early in my life that you let sleeping (or eating) dogs lie. So I steered away from it, shuffling my feet just to let it know I was no threat to its meager food. At the counter, the lady with a stunned look on her face, unplugged the ear phones and tapped with her wrist on the table before her as if to say ‘what will it take to get rid of you?’ I paid, pocketed the change and was let in through a rickety gate, the coat of its varnish new but fractured in places, giving it a unique look that is most suited for a modern art gallery frequented by the overly rich…  In the first hall were many two-stroke engines trapped in the most bizarre and unthinkable contraptions – purse, stiletto, toilet commode, football, stool, accordion, sofa, helmet… The labels had the year of manufacture, maximum speed, engine it housed, and the time it took to manufacture it. It was a strange place, one that evoked feelings of longing and nostalgia. It was not as if I had been to this place before, so I was not sure why I felt that way. The sofa car in particular – it was not the most arresting piece of machinery; if anything it looked like a dumb creature with its nose down, seeking something. It reminded me of the tale from Ramayana where a stone is engulfed in rapture as the spell is broken and a living form manifests. This tale was one of my favorites throughout my childhood- I would think about it while walking to my auto-stand, taking care not to step on a stone lest I rouse it from its deep sleep. Growing up as a child, I found it difficult to comprehend the difference between life and non-life. The teachers used a different set of words – they called it a distinction between organic and inorganic, or was it cellular versus molecular? I was determined to understand the concept of life, how it came to be and how it was different from death. It was around this time that I lost my grandmother – she was eighty I think and it was the first time I saw grownups cry like insensate babies, unwilling to stop, unable to stop. Her dead body was cold and the wrinkled skin on her wrists was turning bluish. Her son claimed she summoned him to her bedside and spoke to him at length about nothing important for about four hours the night before she died. The others wanted to know if she had anything to say about them. But her son wore a drugged face, his eyes suspended over fat bags of sleep, his lips dry and cracked, his heart elsewhere. He could not articulate his thoughts; he missed his mother who was now reduced to a cocoon of brittle bones wrapped in layers of cold flesh. So you see, this episode drilled another dent in the walls of my confusion. If life was separated from non-life through such a thin film of breath, then how was it possible for a stone to synthesize life out of nowhere? I was just a child and I do not know if these feelings of clear contradictions assailed me forever or if I let go of them as I grew older. I do not know at what precise point I felt these questions were far too big for me. I think it was gradual; I have learnt to live with incomprehension. In the museum hall, as I was brought back from my reverie by the sudden sound of a gong, it took me a minute to recompose myself. All the inanimate models in the hall looked as if they implored for attention, their hard edges softening my heart, their rust clinging to my nerves, their tires treading under my skin. Could it be that an omniscient spell was cast on these cars too…? Since it was towards the evening I was in no rush to return home. So I stalled and dithered, aimlessly turning on the heel of my shoe to whichever object came into my sights. From the roof were suspended labels with decorated arrows that showed you where to go next. But whatever was in the next hall could wait. I was not done with this one yet. There was an old double decker bus too. Next to it was a train car and next to it a cycle, all of which were out of place of course. On the walls, in some places I found the laminated cuttings of old newspapers where the maker can be seen driving his cars. The Hindu and Deccan Chronicle have covered many of the shows. Dignitaries including the then chief minister of the state and the then captain of Indian cricket team among others, could be seen with the maker of these cars.   He had a happy face, the sort of face that cannot conceal happiness. Most of us have dreary faces, some of us have wicked faces too. His face was happy. But behind the veneer of happiness there was something else, maybe melancholy, maybe nothing. Maybe it is just my morbid fascination with my own thoughts - I keep thinking that anyone who is capable of creation is condemned to lose something in return just so the books of nature can be balanced. Kurt Cobain (from rock band Nirvana) created great music but lost faith in continuity of life; David Foster Wallace (Pulitzer winner of fiction) created great works of literature but forbid himself from the simple pleasures of life. Perhaps, perfection comes at a price, something that cannot be named but only felt, an experience that is alien to me. As I kept pacing forwards and backwards to keep in pace with my thoughts, I saw this misrepresentation. The label read ‘city car,’ but it was a well. This reminded me of the well in my maternal uncle’s home. They were living in Wanaparthy at the time, a town about 100 kilometers from Hyderabad. Their compound was flanked on all sides by thick shrubbery that grew mutinously high during the rainy seasons and desperately clingy in the summers. During summer holidays, my mother used to take us to her brother’s home for a week or two. Being a small town there was nothing there for me to do there, so I spent most of my time climbing the guava tree and hanging by its branches like a crazed monkey that did not appreciate the accidental human form it inhabited. I fell from the tree and learnt to climb without falling, and when I managed to climb all the way to the top the view from there was worth the efforts. The dry summer wind stroked the tops of the grass stalks, as if combing them to a side. The canal eddied and gurgled on its way, slashing with reflected light, fashioning twinkling diamonds in the stream of water.  Coming back to the well, which is where my thoughts were centered right now. To get the water from the well one had to sling the bucket over the lip of the well and adjust the length of it to sit in the groove of the pulley. Unfortunately, the bucket had small holes that drained water so you had to be smart and capable to pull it up before it lost all the water in it. I liked standing near the well while the men and women of the family came one by one to it, pulling the bucket out as it made a steady splashing sound from the deep hollow. Whenever I craned my neck to assess the depth of water, all I saw was sheer blackness, the bottom un-guessable and the sides plastered with thick coat of slippery weeds. I wanted to know, I wanted to see it. It was not enough that I saw the proof of water in the bucket, I needed to see the source. The well served as a source of unending curiosity. I am not sure what I was expecting for an answer – of course the water came from the ground just as my school textbooks said it would. It was all part of nature. But I wanted a miracle, I wanted to see something that the textbooks had not captured yet, something that was so intransigent that no one had understood it yet, something that was going to be mine and mine alone. The second hall was different from the first one insofar that the lighting inside was dim. Moreover, in this hall, the articles were exhibited in a more restrained and careful fashion than the earlier one. Whereas the first hall came at you like an infant trying to win your heart with its antics, the second hall was more matured and moored to its bearings. Even the exhibits were very elaborate – for example the computer car and the camera car; the lotus chariot at the center of the hall and globular footballs along the perimeter; the pencils and sharpeners to one side, the wooden furniture to one side; female paraphernalia such as the lipstick bike, powder puff and the foundation box; cricket bike for boys; cigarette bike to help quitters; the pool table that you can drive anywhere you wanted; and a queen size cot that you would rather sleep on than drive anywhere…      ‘Guinness world record holder,’ lettering on the wall next to a cup and saucer on wheels. It is an unforgettable museum – I won’t be surprised if someone told me all the cars come alive at night to socialize, showing off to each other like the loose skeletons from old graveyard stories. The condom bike was another interesting choice. The newspaper cutting on the side stand referred to the contribution from the museum for AIDS day parade. As I stood there in the fading light of the day, as my senses adjusted to the shift in perception I thought back to the one episode that keeps coming back to me. When I was at onsite about a couple of years ago I was sharing room with a gentleman from Calcutta. He was a short and stocky figure with affectionate eyes that made him look a baby that accidentally grew old. Adjacent to the condo was a huge football field that was rarely ever played on. So much space and yet so few people to use it in Singapore. If it had been India, I found myself thinking, the place would have been filled with multiple teams playing simultaneous cricket side by side, bowlers running across intermediate pitches as part of their run-ups, fielders accidentally taking catches for shots from other teams, batsmen unconcerned for where the ball went up as long as it connected the bat… Anyway, on one of the long weekends I and my roommate sat down with a bag of chips on the rim of the football field, sipping long island ice tea and wondering aloud about randomness in the world. It was at this juncture that I asked him what if there were more than 2 sexes. Sex is a recent introduction to the machinery of evolution on this planet. With the addition of sex the growth of species which had been stilted and shunted until then exploded into an umbrella of variety, charting new mutations and offspring. But what if, within the realm of evolution, there were not 2 but 3, or 4, or even 5 sexes. If sex was so beneficial and fundamental in the success story of evolution, then why not have more – more the merry! My friend sighed and sounded sleepy, his eyes scanning the sea of stars above us. With his left hand he slugged the long island ice tea while the trained fingers of his right hand stretched to make a clutch of some chips. I thought he would let go. We sat in silence for a while. And then he gave me an elaborate arithmetic reasoning the summary of which was – the advantage of more sexes would be offset by the fact that the sexual sampling would still favor just two: A and B would produce either A or B; B and C would produce either B or C; D and E would produce either D or E. So in a pool of A, B, C, D and E, someone is always at an advantage of mating with others and so less likely to develop any mating rituals because this someone is always going to get a mate. Someone is always going to be aggressively outnumbered and turn into a belligerent adventurer so as to ensure continuity into the next generation. And yet someone would give up owing to paucity of familiar sexes. So his mathematical model was to sort the levels of familiarity between sexes in such a way that the most familiar pair would evolve and the less familiar pair would perish and so on. I am not sure if it makes a whole lot of sense now, but the mental circus required to imagine all the mating rituals gave me the creeps. By design or by fortune, it is what it is, it is how it is…     It was getting late in the museum. The night brought in a host of changes including the whine of insects and the rattle of a rusted gate from somewhere. I finished my tour of the museum but I waited for a little while in the parking lot, in the blind hope of a mystery – perhaps a gentle tug of the seat cover on the sofa car may bring it to life, its bug eye headlights popping open and its kettle-black wheel rims chiming, its unseen exhaust pipe sending out a spool of sputtering fumes. And so I drove back home and was assaulted by a sense of loss, of having left some part of me behind there. Even today, as I write this, I can’t help but wonder if the sofa car is ambushed by lipstick bike and the train car and the football car and the burger car… At home, I logged into my company mailbox and found a mail from my manager. A new project was assigned. I was summoned. All the fire of nostalgia doused as I finished reading that mail. I was back to square one – back to office. Why are companies like this - Can’t they afford to cut us some slack, let us have a satisfying fill of freedom? After dinner I sat down to watch national geographic channel, my favorite. It was then it occurred to me: Companies are like trees in a thick forest – some of them are so tall as to lap up all the sunlight without giving heed to minnows around them; some are fat-trunked, their leaves broad so as to brush aside other limp fellows around them, and trap more sunlight in the process; some are clever climbers that invest all their energy in shooting up, tendril by tendril, fishing for the healthiest of trunks around them, ascending above all others in search of the richest and unadulterated sunlight there is… There are merits to each of these strategies. And there are downsides - one of them is that the work place can become less interesting. May be the corporations’ motivations are not aligned with employees’ interests? Maybe the corporations of future would figure out clever ways to reconcile the two. Until then, people like me, at times, feel like we are having a rather long and dull and unbearably boring day. Last edited by SyncNest : 9th April 2015 at 23:01. |
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10th April 2015, 11:47
| #24 | |
| Team-BHP Support   | Re: Sudha Car Museum, Hyderabad Quote:
Have merged your thread with an existing one on the same museum. | |
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10th April 2015, 16:43
| #25 | |
| BANNED | Re: Sudha Car Museum, Hyderabad Quote:
Thanks once again! | |
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10th April 2015, 16:53
| #26 | |
| BANNED | Re: Sudha Car Museum, Hyderabad Quote:
And the insect-like space-frame tricycle/bicycle creations reflect the creators humorous eccentricity! Thanks again | |
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13th April 2015, 08:43
| #27 |
| BHPian  Join Date: Sep 2014 Location: Vijayawada-HYD
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11th August 2020, 23:59
| #28 |
| Distinguished - BHPian  | Re: Sudha Car Museum, Hyderabad |
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