A handmade car named Machivy

On his days off, businessman B C Madhusudan spends his time making cars.

Different people do different things in their spare time. Some like spending time with their family, others may try catching a film or hang out with friends and get wasted.

There is no single activity that defines relaxation. Can building a car from scratch with one's own hands constitute an interest that takes you away from the drudgery of daily life and relaxes you to the point of bliss?

B C Madhusudan, who owns a moderate-size car-hire business specialising in cars for call centres, has spent the last few years of his life doing just that.

Madhusudan's interest in cars and bikes started at the age of nine. His father, an academic, and his brother would spend their spare time fixing cars. During his college days, when he studied commerce, he had a large number of bikes.

Says Madhusudan, "When I started out, my passion was bikes. When you own bikes like the BSA you are forced to learn about automobiles. To me the way bikes sound is better than music by Beethoven."

Says Madhusudan about the car he has built, "I made this entire car except for the engine, gear box and the differential. Its not made to any specific measurement. This car can compete with a Ford or Esteem in its pick-up."

The car, which looks like an MG, took Madhusudan two years to build. He would devote about an hour a day to this project. And since the car needed a name, Madhusudan, his two children and wife decided to call it Machivy, taking letters from their names.

Thus, a handmade car named Machivy was born. Says Madhusudan, "When we take her out on the road on weekends, many people mistake it for a vintage car, and I don't bother to correct them."

Handmade cars, a novel concept in India, aren't much of a rarity in the West. The concept of kit cars has been around for many years. A kit car means that all the auto parts are either sold by a manufacturer as a full kit or bought separately and then assembled by hand.

The first such instance of a kit car probably dates back to around 1896, when Thomas Hyler White developed a design for a car which could be assembled at home. A few years later, roughly around 1912, a kit car in the US could be bought for about $140.

However, real interest in these cars took off only in the 1950s. Now, countries like Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Estonia, Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa and, of course, the UK and the US have kit car manufacturers.

Machivy cost Madhusudan as little as Rs 70,000 to make, a steal really when compared with the fact that the Maruti 800, still the cheapest car in India costs upwards of Rs 2 lakh.

"Till last year, the car had a Fiat engine but I decided to upgrade it to a 118 NE engine and gear box," says Madhusudan. He goes on to add, "This car looks like an old model, non-performing machine but it has been built for the purpose of performance."

To further enhance the performance of his car, Madhusudan wants to put in a V6 engine, something that is found more commonly in large and expensive cars, and hot rods.

A hot rod is an ordinary production car that has been extensively souped up for enhanced performance by modifying some of the standard equipment. Though hot rod culture was at its peak between the 1930s and 1960s, interest in them still endures in the US.

Madhusudan, who drives a Contessa (remember it?) and has many good things to say about it, is now working on a Mercedes-Benz that has been out of comission for about 30 years. The 1974-make car was bought by Madhusudan for about Rs 50,000 and he estimates that the car is going to cost him another Rs 3 lakh even though the assembly has been done by him.

He says, "I can do the fabrication and mechanicals myself but I don't have the expertise to do the paint job." He plans to fit a CNG kit in the Mercedes so that when he does the Delhi"�Gurgaon run, it is more cost-effective.

But if one can buy an original Mercedes in the country, why bother going to the trouble of making one? He looks nonplussed by the question and says, "All the exotic cars in India are out of reach." And adds for good measure, "Indians aren't automobile-conscious. We only have the tonga and yet we still don't have a state-of-the-art tonga in India."

By the time people hit 40, they are ready for the toned-down, domesticated life of a householder. Madhusudan, who is now 42, says that even though he runs a successful business which he built up over years of struggle and hardship, one day he may just make cars full-time, because he says he is "better than most mechanical engineers. I can probably write detailed papers on cars."