SHUTTER SPEED

Performance benchmarks from the Y2K era get together for 36 frames of action

- Ruman Devmane

It's no longer considered feasible to dedicate time to something that doesn't guarantee an outcome. A reward, today, is non-negotiable. Life wasn't this way back when the two machines you see here were India's heroes. To give you context, in the early 2000s, digital photography wasn't a thing yet not for us, anyway. This meant, a succession of photographers would set off on our infamous shoots, going through the rigour of capturing cars and motorcycles on a Nikon F601 or a Contax G1, almost always uncertain of whether or not the photographs would turn out well. Or at all. That's film photography for you.

Somehow, they always made it work, though. When I proposed, therefore, that Pablo dish out one of his period-correct film cameras for this flashback sequence of a story, I figured we'd all get to live (or re-live, in his case) a moment right from the past. Rounding up the machines was all too simple, too. A couple of calls to well-meaning friends, a clever ambush (for the City), and they showed up at their tidiest best.

POINT OF VIEW

The Honda City VTEC rolled in first, making (thankfully) all the right noises. From its low-slung cabin emerged Miheer Patankar, a dentist, who almost immediately began forewarning us of all of his newly-acquired car's imperfections. I tried to put him at ease about it, partly because it's not as if the City has anything to prove today, but also because it couldn't have been anywhere close to being as disastrous as the City I had bought a few years ago. Mine was probably put together as an experiment - by a biologically inadequate person, at bestand, unsurprisingly, I no longer own it.