About Me

"I am a family physician and public health specialist, and have lived and worked in Africa, Asia and North America. I am passionate about health-care development and am a co-founder and director of Healtheon Asia.

This is a collection of my thoughts, travels and things I can't otherwise classify."
- Dr Armid Azadeh

Tuesday 4 August 2009

Speed: To thrill or to kill?


My childhood memories of things I aspired to acquire later in life revolved predominantly around a series of super-charged automobiles, each surpassing the previous, sometimes due to aesthetic beauty but always due to performance. There was the Diablo, the F40, and then the Bugatti Veyron. Today the fastest production car is the SSC Ultimate Aero with a top speed of 257mph.  I recall paging through my dad’s old magazines to find a test for a car and flipping forward to find its performance ratings. I would avidly read up about its acceleration, top-speed and power to mass ratio. Once licensed to drive, I reveled in the thrill of driving rather too fast and too reckless. While I never had a major disaster, and thus lived to write this piece, in one piece, I did have several narrow scrapes which inevitably preempted a period of more responsible driving (lasting only until I forgot that I wasn’t totally invincible).