Foto

This 1930 Studebaker immaculately restored and maintained by its current owner Mohd. Parvez has a unique though unhappy position in the history of India.
Nicknamed Killer it features here not for its showstopper looks but because it has the dubious ditinction of carrying Nathu Ram Godse, Mahatma Gandhi's killer to the assasination site.

Though Gandhi was born a trader (bania), there was a powerful and endearing streak of the gambler and the outlaw in him. When Hindus and Muslims were engaged in fierce intercommunal strife in 1946 and 1947, he moved among them alone and unprotected, dared them to do their worst, and by sheer force of personality consoled the inconsolable, dissolved hatred, and restored a climate of humanity.

When a bomb was dropped at one of his prayer meetings a few weeks later, he chided his frightened audience for being scared of a “mere bomb”. Through fasts, he quelled violence in Calcutta and New Delhi.

When the government of independent India decided, with popular support, to renege on its promise to transfer to Pakistan its share of assets, he took on the entire country, and successfully fasted to awaken its sense of honour and moral obligation.

This deeply angered a section of Hindu nationalists, one of whom, the abovementioned Nathu Ram Godse,after respectfully bowing to him, shot him dead at a prayer meeting on January 30, 1948.
The car lives on and I had the privelege to drive her last November....impeccable machine!