Modern Classic

Ten years down the line, a Maserati is still a spine tingling Italian exotic.

- Anand Mohan

IF YOU DROWN OUT THE CHAOS OF THE lives we are living while gazing at an hourglass, you come to a point where two things exist, the sand and you. Every falling particle is a fraction of a second and when many of them fall together at speed, you can’t put a number to time passing by. Somewhere right there, you are lost in time. It could be day or night, 2007 or 2017. Time at that moment is not running fast or slow, it is just right. Just like the time a Maserati GranTurismo Sport rolls in to the shoulder of a road we are waiting at, on an overcast morning in Mumbai. You stop and stare and time passes by as the chaos is drowned in the beauty of the GranTurismo.

A decade ago, Apple launched the first iPhone and Maserati launched the GranTurismo. You get an iPhone 7 now. How times have changed with phones taking massive leaps in technology. The makers are making them more addictive than they were back then, but also making people disconnect, for lack of a better word, with the people around them. It is similar with cars in the past decade or two. Almost every other engine that drives us these days is turbocharged, fake exhaust notes are piped through speakers, steering is electrically-assisted and there is air in bellows instead of conventional springs to cushion you from bumps. The good news is (common knowledge actually), the GranTurismo has none of them. In 20-effing-17, this is a car from 2007, (the GT Sport variant came in 2012) showing us how old school is still cool.