BAPTISED BY METAL

WE BRING OUT THE BIG GUNS

- WORDS KRANTI SAMBHAV & TUHIN GUHA

While I was stomping my foot to remove the thick layer of mud from my newly bought jungle boots, I heard a question from the Senior Ustad. He had accompanied me for the ride and was instructing me with a staff, tapping on my left or right side for directions as the engine noise and heavy metal soundtrack did not allow us to communicate in words.

“Have you driven a tank before?”

“No, sir,” I said.

That question was the theme of my days at the training area of ACC&S and MIC&S, Ahilyanagar.

“A journey that started with a simple discussion on our anniversary edition. Go big or go home, as they say, and while looking for a big story for our anniversary edition, we did go big. It cannot get bigger than this. A story where ‘drives like a tank’ and ‘built like a tank’ are not just phrases.”

Most of us oscillate between two ideas. “Sab kuch likha hua hai,” like Hrithik Roshan says in ZNMD. That everything is written. Predetermined. Or that nothing is set in stone and we write our own stories. But what if there is a third path? Right after school, I tried getting into the National Defence Academy. I did not make it. That chapter closed before it could even begin. But now, after spending nearly half my life in automotive journalism, reviewing machines, chasing performance, counting torque and power figures, I sometimes wonder what if the two paths were not separate? What if I could have served the nation and still fed my obsession with engines, speed and mechanical power? While chatting with my colleagues, I realised this is a common question we all keep asking. WHAT IF? Difficult to answer for sure. Can we even attempt to find the answer? Then we thought WHY NOT?