The French Dream: 1984 Peugeot Quasar

 

Concept cars from the 1970s and the 1980s are, for me, uniquely fascinating. There’s something exceptionally cool about those cars, perhaps because they represent the unbridled imagination, hope and ambition of the people who conceptualised and designed those cars. One of these is the Peugeot Quasar, a 600bhp concept car, but first a bit of background. Back in 1984, Peugeot was on a roll, having launched the brilliant 205 GTI hot hatch for the street and running the mid-engined, four-wheel-drive 205 Turbo 16 in the Group B World Rally championship. It was in this year itself that Peugeot engineers started work on the Quasar prototype, a two-seater sedan with which the French company wanted to go racing from 1987.

Assembled in the PSA plant in La Garenne and unveiled at the 1984 Paris Motor Show, the Peugeot Quasar was ‘inspired’ by the astronomical phenomenon of the ‘Quasar,’ which according to Wikipedia is ‘an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus with enormous radiant energy.’ Built on the same chassis as the Peugeot 205 Turbo 16 and with a 600-horsepower engine from the Group B rally car, the Quasar represented cutting-edge automotive technology of the 1980s. Along with its space-age styling, other notable bits on the Quasar included its scissor doors, which were made of carbonfibre and Kevlar, interiors that featured hand-stitched red leather and a digital instrument panel with a multimedia CRT screen.

With the demise of Group B rally cars in 1987, Peugeot (as well as other car manufacturers) had to cancel the development of many race/rally car projects and the Quasar was one of those; it never progressed beyond the prototype stage. Only a single example of the car was ever built, which today lives on in the Peugeot collection at the Musée de l'Aventure Peugeot in Sochaux, in France. The car looks pretty spectacular even today, and one wonders what might have been if the Quasar had actually made it to production.

On the Hippie Trail: The Coolest Books to Read – Part 1

For most of us, the word ‘hippie’ is associated with images from the 1960s-70s, of Westerners – long-haired white men and women – clad in semi-tattered psychedelic clothing, smoking weed, chilling out on the beaches of Goa, dancing to their own beat and generally not giving a damn. An article from the July 7, 1967 issue of Time magazine puts it succinctly: ‘Whatever their meaning and wherever they may be headed, the hippies have emerged on the US scene in about 18 months as a wholly new subculture, a bizarre permutation of the middle-class American ethos from which it evolved. Hippies preach altruism and mysticism, honesty, joy and non-violence. They find an almost childish fascination in beads, blossoms and bells, blinding strobe lights and ear-shattering music, exotic clothing and erotic slogans.’

In those heady ‘flower power’ days, when American psychologist and author Timothy Leary was exhorting people to ‘turn on, tune in, drop out,’ Europe was also getting in on the act. Powered by hashish and with visions of freedom from the shackles of Western society and the pressures to conform, starry-eyed young people (alright, some were actually not all that young…) clambered on to rickety buses and Volkswagen vans to drive the ‘hippie trail,’ which went via Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, finally culminating in either Goa, India or Kathmandu, Nepal. All you need is love, sang the Beatles, as the hippies journeyed in the hopes of finding free love, peace and enlightenment.

The hippie movement was a unique counterculture phenomenon of the 1960s-70s and many who hit the hippie trail back then lived to tell their stories via the books they went on to write. Some, who missed the bus back then (by virtue of having been born much later, when the movement had already died out) have chosen to recreate the journey, in an attempt to experience some of what those early hippies may have experienced. Again, some very interesting books have been written. (Of course, much of the old ‘hippie trail’ overland route from Europe to India is now inaccessible due to the prevailing situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but some people either find a way or an alternative route.)

So, for those who may be fascinated with hippie culture and the adventures undertaken on the hippie trail all those years ago, here is my list of books that will help you live the hippie life without getting anywhere near an old, beat-up Volkswagen minibus. Since one can’t actually rewind the clock and go back to the 1960s-70s, reading these books just have to be the next best thing you can do if you happen to be interested in the hippie life. This is part 1 of my two-part list of the must-read books on life on the hippie trail.

Land Rover Defender 110 Driving Impression

The Land Rover Defender 110 looks good, drives well and costs the earth!

I had a chance to drive and review the Land Rover Defender 110, back in 2021, for Man’s World magazine. I’m not really a huge fan of SUVs and fast, sporty cars (like the Audi S5, which I love so much!) are more my kind of thing. Still, for what it’s worth, I quite liked the Defender 110 and enjoyed the experience of driving it - more for its sheer size and road presence rather than its driving dynamics. Anyway, here is the article I wrote for the magazine.

What’s an SUV? That isn’t always an easy question to answer these days. Buyers across segments don’t seem to want cars anymore; everyone wants an SUV. So, of course, every car wants to be an SUV, which is why you have softroaders, crossovers, compact SUVs, SUV-inspired hatchbacks and more. Marketing types everywhere know a good idea when they see one; take a regular hatchback, jack it up a bit for slightly increased ride height, slap on a bigger set of wheels, bolt on some plastic cladding on the sides and on the wheelarches, add an extra dollop or two of chrome, give it a fancy new paintjob and a cool sounding name, and there you have it, a brand-new SUV for the unsuspecting masses!

Ducati XDiavel S: Italian Easy Rider

The Ducati XDiavel S remains one of the most beautiful motorcycles I've ever ridden

It’s hard to slot the Ducati XDiavel S into a specific segment or category. Is it a sportsbike? A cruiser? Touring bike? The reality is, the XDiavel S is a machine that dares to defy segmentation – brimming with cutting-edge engineering, design and technology, it’s a bike that looks like a cruiser, has the engine performance of a sportsbike, and with its adjustable ergonomics, it’s comfortable enough for long-distance riding. Even the handling is not too bad, as long as you keep in mind this isn’t exactly a Panigale.

I got to spend a few days with the XDiavel back in 2017, when I was the executive editor at Auto Tech Review magazine. Here’s what I wrote about the bike at that time.

Off the Shelf: The Rise and Fall of BooksFirst

Back in October 2022, I started working on setting up a new website, BooksFirst, which I finally launched in December that year. This website was supposed to be a useful, interesting online resource for people who love books. Or, more specifically, non-fiction books. And the objective was to go beyond just book reviews, book excerpts and book launches – regular books website stuff. I’ve always been an ardent reader and had, over the years, developed a keen interest in the book publishing business and how things work in publishing. And so, with BooksFirst, my objective was to find interesting stories from the world of books and publishing and bring those stories to the world. The site featured writers, authors, journalists, illustrators, designers, photographers, librarians, book publishers, book retailers and many others who were simply passionate about books and reading. They had an eclectic selection of stories to tell – about their work, about the book(s) they've written, about the books they read, about the authors they like – and I did my best to bring those stories to fellow book lovers.

The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir

‘The strangely enduring and occasionally fractious friendship that developed between the famously outspoken historian [and book author] Ramachandra Guha and his reticent editor Rukun Advani is the subject of this quite eccentric and thoroughly compelling literary memoir,’ says the publisher’s note, about The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir, which was published by Juggernaut Books earlier this year. ‘Built around letters and emails between an outgoing and occasionally combative scholar and a reclusive editor prone to private outbursts of savage sarcasm, this book is never short of the kind of wit, humour, and drollery that has been strangled by contemporary political correctness,’ it adds.

We are told that the Guha-Advani relationship, which has survived ‘forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring,’ started in Delhi in the early 1980s, a time when Guha was still an unpublished Ph.D scholar and Advani a greenhorn editor with the Oxford University Press (OUP). ‘The relationship grew and blossomed through the 1990s, when Guha grew into a pioneering historian of the environment and of cricket, while also writing his pathbreaking biography of Verrier Elwin. Over these years, Advani was Guha’s most constant confidant, his most reliable reader. He encouraged him to craft and refine the literary style for which Guha became internationally known – narrative histories that have made vast areas of scholarship popular and accessible,’ says the publisher’s note.

Publishing industry veteran, Sridhar Balan, who joined the Oxford University Press in 1985 and spent close to two decades working there, shares his own memories of OUP in the context of Guha’s memoir. Balan, who worked alongside Rukun Advani at OUP and was witness to the exchanges that took place between him and Ramachandra Guha, writes about their working relationship in his own inimitable manner, which is a joy to read and, as a review of the book itself, provides an excellent primer to what you can expect to read in The Cooking of Books.  

Book Review: Bhang Journeys - Stories, Histories, Trips and Travels

Made with the leaves of the cannabis plant, bhang has been consumed in India for thousands of years. Mixed with thandai or lassi, bhang – which is mildly psychoactive and which can produce feelings of euphoria – is often consumed during the festival of Holi, although true connoisseurs will give it a go at any time of the year. Now, you’d probably expect to find bhang afficionados lounging in the mountains of Himachal or chilling out on the beaches of Goa, not sitting down to write a book about their adventures with psychoactive substances. But that’s exactly what Akshaya Bahibala has done with Bhang Journeys: Stories, Histories, Trips and Travel. A poet, bookseller, publisher and co-founder of Walking BookFairs, Bahibala – who is based in Bhubaneswar – spent ten years of his life tripping on bhang and ganja, and has now written a very interesting account of his experiences in Bhang Journeys.

Essential Retro: 11 Books for Those Who Love Vintage Tech

I have a strange affliction – the love of old stuff. Classic and vintage cars. Supersonic aircraft from the 1960s and fighter jets from the 1970s. High-end hi-fi systems from the 1970s and the ’80s. Motorcycles from the 1970-80s. Old movies, old music, very old furniture and old mansions, especially abandoned ones, which haven’t been lived in for decades. Very old photographs. Automotive and technology magazines from 40-50 years ago. And so on.

In all of the above, one of the things I love most is reading about vintage technology. I find old computers – machines from the 1950s-1980s – utterly fascinating. Names like IBM, Burroughs, NCR, CDC, Honeywell, General Electric, DEC, Cray, Xerox PARC and RCA. Also, HP, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair, Radio Shack and Tandy. And not just the machines and the tech of that era, it’s what scientists and engineers were able to do with those machines and that tech is what never ceases to amaze me. Despite the tiny amounts of computing power and severely limited capabilities compared to modern computers, the computers of that era still helped launch space missions and execute landings on the moon, in addition to handling more prosaic – but still very important – tasks of large-scale data processing, and control and automation of manufacturing processes in large factories.

What’s also fascinating is looking at just how far we’ve come. Consider this: An IBM System/370 Model 145 mainframe computer from the year 1970, which was large enough to take up one entire room, ran at 2.5MHz, had 500KB of RAM and 233MB of hard disk space. Today, it’s commonplace for a fairly basic desktop personal computer to have a four- or six-core processor running at anywhere between 2.5GHz to 4.6GHz, with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of hard disk space. It’s perhaps something like going from a Ford Model T to a Ferrari SF90 Stradale – the progress that’s been made is simply astonishing, almost unbelievable.   

Personally, I’ve been using computers since the late-1980s and have, over the years, progressed from MS-DOS (running on an old IBM PC/XT) all the way up to Windows 11. Funnily enough, while my computers have gotten ever faster over the decades, I’ve been doing less with them with every passing decade. Back in the mid-1990s, I used a Pentium 133 with 64MB of RAM and 1GB of hard disk space to run applications like 3D StudioMAX, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop, CorelDraw and AutoCAD. Today, I use my PC (quad-core Intel Core i3 processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, 27-inch 2K display) to run MS Word, send a few emails, watch videos and browse the web. That’s a bit like doing 160kph in an old Premier Padmini and then pottering along at 60kph in an Audi Quattro.

Anyway, for those who might share my fascination with old stuff – old computers, old technologies – I’ve compiled a list of very interesting books, which I really enjoyed reading.

Iconic Brands: The Books That Mean Business

From Nike, LEGO and Sony to Volkswagen, Nokia and Adidas, there are so many companies – iconic brands – that we know and love, and whose products are a part of our everyday lives. But how much do we really know about the companies we sometimes adore? For those who may be interested in looking under the hood and trying to understand what makes these companies work – and in some cases, what caused their downfall – here’s a selection of incisive, entertaining and well-written books that you don’t want to miss.