Dear diary, petrol’s at a whopping ₹100
Every now and then, someone in the family will ask, so why are you writing down those numbers?
Yes: every time we buy petrol, I note down five things about the purchase: the date, the odometer reading, the number of litres, the total price, and the price per litre. All this, in a pocket diary we keep in the car. So far, we’ve filled 36 pages—in pencil, in blue, black, red and (once) orange ink. At about 14 entries on each page, that’s well over 400 times that we’ve bought petrol. No, I don’t want to think about how many rupees we’ve spent on the stuff.
But why do it? One reason is to track our car’s fuel consumption. This is how I know that we get 8-9km per litre (kmpl) of petrol in city driving, and sometimes as much as 20kmpl on our many long-distance forays—over the years, to Goa, Delhi, Bengaluru, Pachmarhi and Kanpur.
