Whipsplash

It’s simple. It’s cheap. And it withstands torture. The all-new Gurkha

- Sriram Narayanan

He had bought his farm sometime in 1994, and by 1999, he decided to give up his upper managerial job and take up farming full time. He is my uncle. On some weekends, he used to drive about 280km in his Mahindra MM 540 to get to his farm. That journey in that vehicle was not something a 10-year-old me or anybody in the family looked forward to. I suspect he left his job and got into it full-time to save himself the commute. Now, last-mile access to the farm is determined by the weather. If it’s cold and dry, you can walk and get there in peace. If it’s cold and wet, you’d need gumboots to walk through the access ‘road’. Vehicles? Most would need to be parked about 2km away. His Mahindra would just about go through after some struggle. Forget all of that. You want to know how remote his place is? In 2017, the single-lane road going to his and several other properties around doesn’t show up as a road on Google Maps. Things have improved a bit, though. Over the decades, authorities have built a sort of surface over what was previously a dirt track. So, in the dry, his Maruti Omni can get in. But when you live 4000 feet above sea level, cold, monsoon and fog don’t leave much room for dry spells.

So, believe me when I tell you off-roading isn’t an adventure, it isn’t a hobby. For many, it’s a process of simply getting home. Of course, you could always get a Range Rover for such places. But there are two issues. Well, it’s expensive. Even assuming you have the money, you just wouldn’t want to. You see, you want a simple off-roader that can be set right by the local mechanic with a hammer and a screwdriver. Take a machine with a computer-controlled Terrain Response System to him, and you’d be… well, the word cannot be published in the BCCL and WWM group of publications, unless a person is being quoted. And even then, it needs a string of asterisks.