Full Circle – with a VW in the Middle…

Some moments arrive dressed up as ordinary errands. You go to look at a car. You drive home having touched something much older than any car.

Yesterday, I was honoured to be invited to the relaunch of the Volkswagen marque in Sri Lanka, organised by Continental Cars & Commercials. It was inspiring and visually stunning — the kind of event that gets the production values exactly right without ever letting them upstage the machine. And when they pulled the cover off the Taigun, the room did that thing rooms do when something is genuinely worth looking at. It went quiet, then it didn’t.

But that’s not really why I was standing there with a lump in my throat.

Let me take you back forty-odd years.

The first car my father ever owned was a VW Beetle. A proper one. Appachchi was already past forty when he got it — which, when you’re a teenager, feels like roughly the age of the pyramids — and I have never, before or since, seen the man so excited and so terrified in equal measure. He had wanted this car. He had saved for this car. And now that it was actually his, sitting there with its little round headlamps looking faintly amused at all the fuss, he was so nervous about driving it home that I — a teenager, with exactly zero licences to my name — ended up doing most of the driving back.

Read that sentence again. My father, a grown man, a careful man, was so rattled by the joy of finally owning his Beetle that he handed the wheel to his unlicensed son. I’d like to tell you we did it out of some grand principle. We didn’t. We did it because his hands weren’t steady and mine, gloriously, didn’t know enough to be. That is the whole story of fathers and sons, really, compressed into one short and slightly illegal drive home.

That little 5 Sri Beetle is the reason I have loved the VW marque for the rest of my life. Not because of horsepower or heritage or any of the proper, defensible reasons a grown man is supposed to give. I love it because for one afternoon, my dad trusted me with the thing he loved most in the world, and we got home in one piece, and he laughed about it for years afterward.

For years, on and off, I have tried to find that exact car. The actual Beetle. I’ve followed leads, asked around, chased the kind of rumours that old cars leave behind like footprints. Nothing. It is, as far as I can tell, gone — sold, scrapped, or quietly rusting somewhere I’ll never look. You’d think a man would let that go after a couple of decades. I haven’t. Some absences keep their shape.

So when I heard VW was being relaunched here in Sri Lanka, I did something I don’t usually do. I took a leap of faith and booked the Taigun before I’d laid eyes on it.

A large part of that leap has a name: Charu Seneviratna. Charu was the person I called to ask about the Taigun, and within the space of one conversation he turned into the kind of brand ambassador every company prays for and almost none deserve. I put down the deposit without having seen the car in person. That is not a sentence I write lightly. I have spent a career teaching people how to influence, persuade, and build trust — and there I was, wallet open, charmed by a man who simply, genuinely, loved what he was talking about. Sheer respect, Charu. You made it easy.

There’s a small comedy to the day, too. We couldn’t stay till the end of the event — little man had school the next morning, and so we drove back to Kandy the moment the reveal was done. It was only later that Inoka Dias told me I’d actually been called up to symbolically collect the “token key” for the car at the event. I’d left. I missed my own moment. Of course I did. Sigh. Somewhere in the etiquette books there’s a chapter on how to gracefully accept a ceremonial key, and somewhere on the road to Kandy there’s me, missing it entirely, because a nine-year-old had a maths class.

I wouldn’t trade the trip back for the key.

Because here is the part that actually undid me. The reason this is a full circle and not just a nice purchase. My son was there. And it was my son — not me — who did all the research, dug into the Taigun, weighed it against everything else, and then turned to me and said we should get it. He talked me into it. He urged me on. So when we stood there together watching that cover come off, I realised I was living both ends of the same story at once: I was the teenager who drove appachchi’s Beetle home, and I was appachchi, standing beside a boy who was more sure of things than I was.

Talking to Peter Jasinghe during the launch sealed it. Peter speaks about VW with a love and an insight that is, frankly, infectious — and by the end of it, my little man wasn’t just excited about the new car. He was more convinced than ever that we should go and find Appachchi’s old Beetle and restore it. My father’s car. My son’s mission. I just stood there, somewhere in the middle, being passed the wheel all over again.

Some moments in time get etched into you for good. The drive home, all those years ago, was one. Yesterday was another. And if my boy gets his way, there may yet be a third — a salvaged Beetle in a garage somewhere, three generations finally sharing the same back seat.

Everything teaches. I’m just glad I was paying attention this time.