Quattro Conversations with Dr. Cyres Mehta
Here’s a fact. Dr. Cyres Mehta is one of the fastest cataract surgeons in the world. As surgical director at the International Eye Center in Colaba, Mumbai, he’ll set your cataract right in just four minutes! He’s won many awards for his craft, is all for social causes (to put it mildly) and is the pioneer of robotic cataract surgery in India. Google has all the dope on what he’s achieved but we’ve discovered something else about him, something you won’t find online. In addition to the long alphabet soup that makes up his qualifications (M.B.B.S., MCH, F.A.G.E., F.S.V.H., F.N.E.R.F., F.A.S.C.R.S., F.S.E.C.), he’s also a certified car nut and he has to be, he’s Parsi. So, how does the fastest eye surgeon in the world satiate his need for speed?
It’s 8a.m. on a Sunday morning when his man Friday winds up one of the doctor’s rolling shutter garages. Inside, is a gleaming (and I mean gleaming) electric blue Audi RS5. I ask him if we can go for a spin and he agrees. The chap that he is, the good doctor talks non-stop about cars and here’s what he had to say.
Parsis and their cars
“The earliest car that I can remember is an old Ambassador Mk 1 and more importantly, its petrol smell. When you got in to it in the morning, your nose was greeted with a mix of petrol and rexine (there was no leather in those days) and you simply don’t get that anymore. You become a petrol-sniffing addict and I miss that at some level. Today’s cars can’t afford to smell like that.
I went to the US to study, qualified as a surgeon and I got back to India in 2001. At that point, I couldn’t afford anything so the first car I bought was a Baleno. Within a month I put an open pipe and it was loud, quick and loads of fun. I sold it in about three years because the Octavia RS hit the scene. In the RS, I went for a huge turbo conversion kit and an open pipe and that car was so quick, I would get wheelspin in third gear when the turbo lit up. It was putting out around 300bhp and I even changed the suspension – I put in Koni shocks, but it still couldn’t handle the power. If I pushed the throttle all the way in around a corner, the front wheels would break free and the car would slide in to understeer. I finally ditched that and picked up a 530d which I still have – it’s the E60, a proper driver’s car, and not the tarted up F10. The Audi RS5 was the next car I bought.”
Eye surgery and tech
“The latest cataract surgery tech has only been around for two years or so abroad and it’s only come to India six months ago. It’s semi-automatic robotic cataract surgery. Normally you would have to incise the eye, go in and do a certain number of steps by hand and then use ultrasound, smash the cataract and suck it out through that small incision. Nowadays, you have a robot to do everything so there’s nothing touching the patient. The robot interfaces with the eye like a spacecraft docking on to a space station. Then a laser makes the openings, smashes the cataract and all we have to do after the procedure is over – in 30 seconds – is inject the lens. We are absolutely on par with the best centres in Germany and Switzerland and are ahead of UK and other countries, which have total nationalised healthcare because they don’t want to spend the money on it. It’s absolutely space age stuff and it uses declassified radar guided technology from the US government’s Star Wars weapons program. The laser tracks the eye a 1000 times a second and is so accurate, you really can’t go wrong. When the Bush administration declassified the Star Wars weapons program, a lot of this radar guided tech (to track and shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles) became available in the public domain. An Indian scientist by the name of Srinivasan who was working at IBM realised that you could use a laser beam to inscribe chips rather than using the stamping method and then him and another ophthalmologist, Stephen Trokel, wrote a paper on how lasers can be used to reshape the corneas of a rabbit’s eyes. That was the beginning of laser vision correction and it’s why nobody needs to wears glasses anymore. You can attribute it to the work done by Srinivasan and Trokel in 1987 when I was in the 10th grade.
Eye surgery is very high tech and every six months you get a new model, new technology and new software and so, eye doctors are very technologically driven and don’t get overawed by new software or hardware. It’s why I like Audi’s focus on technology. It’s why I love the Audi RS5 – it’s running a lot of tech under the hood with the Quattro system and the direct injection V8, which puts out quite a lot of power from just 4.2-litres.”
The RS5
“I walked in to the Audi showroom in Mumbai three years ago and I saw the RS5 parked there. I asked the guy at the showroom if I could start it up and when the V8 barked to life, I was hooked. My car is running a Capristo race exhaust, so it’s crazy loud (it sounds a lot like an Auto Union V16 – Ed) but it’s got valves so I can quiet it down and not disturb anyone. It’s also running an uprated ECU program and a throttle booster so every movement of the throttle is magnified. I just love the sound of the V8 and I love Audi’s Quattro and its ability to accelerate the outer wheels and brake the inner wheels to get the car to corner harder.
I sometimes drive it everyday depending on my work schedule but I don’t like to take it out in the rain. Like a proper Parsi, I don’t like to get it dirty or get slushy footprints inside the car. I take it out when it’s nice and dry and driving season is starting now. I don’t believe in not driving the car and just keeping it in one corner. It has done 11,000km in two and a half years which is quite a bit for a car like this.
I take this car out at night and my kids are car enthusiasts, they can point out anything – model of car, number of cylinders, bhp – better than me. That’s why I bought this car – the two seats behind can accommodate my two boys. I prefer to put in 97-octane and the car gives me about 5kmpl which is really not bad for something that puts out 460-470bhp, depending on the map it is running.
This car has done the quarter mile run at the Amby valley drag in 12.4 seconds and that includes reaction time, so it’ll probably do a 12 flat. It was faster than a Gallardo and was just 0.1 sec slower than an R8 V10. I like to believe they make some cars better than others and I think my car was one of those. I got a good deal and the ride is not bad either. It’s a usable supercar. With this car, there’s full Audi backup and nothing’s really gone wrong in the time I’ve had it. Sometimes, people tell me this car looks like an A4 and I tell them that maybe it’s time they got cataract surgery.”
The next car
“I’ve done 280kmph in the RS5 on a closed road and I want my next car to break the 300kmph mark. The RS cars are wild. They are the fastest Audis you can buy and they all have the Quattro system which is unbeatable. On our roads, you can have a rear-wheel drive car but most of the time the car is struggling for traction whereas, if you have an all-wheel drive system putting the power down, you’ll be going much faster even if you don’t have too much power. I find that Quattro lets almost anyone get behind the wheel of a fast car and drive safely. I would love to have an RS7 Sportback and I’d buy one in a hearbeat if it wasn’t for those ridiculously inflated import duties. I don’t think they are protecting the Indian car industry by having such high duties anymore and if the government would lower duties, they would make more money because more people would import cars like these in to India. Sadly, there are no car enthusiasts making the rules and if it were up to me, I would abolish all duties.”
Doc, you’re changing the rules of eye surgery in India and we hope you get a chance to change the rules for importing cars because, to put it simply, we like the way you see things.
