Am I a risk taker??

The futile task has remained suspended for a while due to lack of time. Specifically for the last few days of last week I had been extremely busy with work. Not that I don’t blog when I am busy, I can always pull off half an hour. But the subject that I am handling requires some thought and I have not been able to garner the time, The next part however is being documented and would be published soon.You might ask what the hell I was doing in the weekend!!! Exactly that is what I am going to describe over here in this blog.
After the visit to the casino in Genting Highlands, this weekend we gave a shot to Kuantan, a beach on the South China Sea on the East Coast of Malaysia about 300 Km from Kuala Lumpur. Relax!! I am not going to provide a boring anecdote of how beautiful the beach was, how much fun we had jumping around in the water like fifteen year olds. In fact I am going to write about the thrill of the journey. During my London stay I had those wonderful road trips. Unfortunately then, I did not know how to drive a four wheeler. I could only sit on the back seat watching the scenery and appreciating the driving skills of my friend when he reached speed as high as 210 km/hr.
This time I was up with the past experience of having driven some 300 odd kms. The amount of confidence that I had on my driving skills is anybody’s guess, for almost three fourth of those 300 km was spent in the driving school. Moreover the rickshaw-wallahs, the auto-wallahs, the porters and even the pedestrians in a Calcutta road are so much disciplined when they are on the streets that as a driver you could encounter such incidences that might leave a lasting impact of horror in your mind: at least as a novice driver. The result: I was not at all confident.
Comes last Friday, and we as a group decide to hire a car and just ‘GO’ without thinking about the destination. From here I start correlating with the title of the blog. People think I am a very calm & composed kind of person with a very stable head. A few days back a lady suddenly pointed out: he looks so composed & responsible. I describe this quality as being near “Risk Averse”. I have always been perplexed by my care-freeness inside a games field. The two simply don’t correlate. The first line that I started with in this paragraph does not correlate as well. I love that suddenness in life where you don’t know what is coming. Coming back to the trip, our destination was however decided when we got the steering in our hand. I started the journey at my usual position observing others take control. None of my companions were doing great on the wheel, showing under confidence, which gave me the confidence to try it out. The fact that it was an automatic car helped me. I wonder why the car makers in the world still persist with making models that require you to push a lever to shift the gears. It is both ergonomically & technologically the most inefficient thing that needs to be removed. I start driving and decide to keep myself on the slowest lane and not cross the 70-80 mark. Humm!!! - How can that car overtake me?? – I was getting back to myself. That me on my bike, who does not like driving below ‘80’ - even on a crowded road. I sped up and soon was at 90 – 100 driving on the mid lane, Oh common, cars were still zooming past me, I shifted to the rightmost lane and was at 110!! “Hey I have done 110 with my bike” and this is an automatic sedan I am driving!!! I pressed on the accelerator and soon I was at 150. By this time I had overtaken all those Michael Schumacher-s who had zoomed past me. My friends were freaked out; one of them was constantly rambling and shouting at me to slow down. I did not. I did not slow down at the curves. I was totally amazed at my control of the wheel. Soon I reached my top speed of 170 km/hr!!! I wanted to speed more but both the GPS system in the car and my friends did not allow me to.
The return journey was even better, for it was night. And the part of the journey when I took control of the wheels was some hilly region. If you have traveled on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway and remember the curves near the Lonavala Khandala pass, the road was similar and the curves even sharper. I did not mind, I was completely care free. I was at 120-130 and maneuvering the hair-pin curves with utmost ease. I can go on and on but must stop over here to get back to the point. Now sitting back at home when I am thinking of the journey the question that is coming to my mind is did I do the right thing? Perhaps not, but I have a certain me who likes extreme thrills in life. Who wants to do something, which normally other would not dare. I remember an instance in IIT Kanpur flight club where I was the person who feared most of heights, and it was the same me who put his hands up first when asked for a volunteer who would dare to fly up to 5000 ft in a glider. I should some time write about that once in a lifetime experience of mine.
The basic conclusion is “I am a risk taker”. Remove the few constraints in my life (my loved ones) and frankly I don’t care about the entire world. The reason I wanted to delve in this topic is because someone asked me what is the greatest quality required becoming an entrepreneur. And we concluded that one has to be a risk taker. Perhaps I can be one!!!

PS: Please don’t go away; the next part of the futile task is almost there. It has got some intricacies and I require your opinions.