Prologue: I was itching to start this thread for a long long time. But somehow was not able to line it up properly. So thought, let me finally do this in the New Year and here it goes.
Warning: It is going to be bit long and may sound boring at places, because I am not that much a good writer like Samurai. So bear with that.
The story
Due to my father’s transferrable job in a nationalized bank, I have been to various places in West Bengal. And as usual in those days, the official vehicle of the bank offices used to be Jeeps. I can still remember when I was around 7 years, one day I insisted to sit in the driver’s seat of the jeep, when it came to our house for dropping my father. The driver finally made me sit on his lap while driving and gave me chance to hold the steering wheel for couple of times during a short ride!
Though the sound of the engine and the basic rugged look of the jeep always had a different appeal to me, I never ever had a thought of owning a jeep, primarily because I was not very aware of its true characteristics, potential and thrills. Because of my inherent lazy nature and lack of necessity, I even didn’t bother to learn driving until around a year back when it became a requirement because of shift of my office to a remote location in greater noida. Like any other ‘normal’ human being, we (me and wife) started searching for an entry-level hatch to buy in our family. At this point of time, one day I accidentally stumbled across the Tata TL 4x4 monster. Got the beginner’s idea of the basic aspects of a four wheel drive, what it can do etc etc. The look of the vehicle was also highly appealing in the brochure and for couple of days I kept on searching more information on this, managed to read a test drive report of someone in Mumbai. But the day I came to know about its cost, I realized I should not think of buying this vehicle even in the dream. Off-course, not to mention that for a beginner its almost impossible to drive this huge piece of machine. But still, imagining about a vehicle like this did give me some new kind of feel.
Its during this period, while browsing one day, I came across the domain of TeamBhp. And oh man, I was literally dumbstruck to see the kind of interactions on every possible aspects of an automobile. Meanwhile an Alto was finalized for the 1st buy and I did get all the highly useful info I needed from the suggestion thread to buy a new vehicle. Easy manoeuvring, small parking requirement, no hitches, good mileage- Alto did impress me as a starting car.
Time moved on and one fine lucky day I discovered that there is a forum on 4x4 and off-roading in Tbhp! After having a glimpse, I told to myself, how come I missed this zone till now! The next couple of days, probably the only thing I did was to gulp and guzzle the stories/ descriptions/ experiences/ pictures / OTR reports submitted by all the off-road enthusiastic, GTO, Samurai, Khan_Sultan, Arka, headers, nitrous, DirtyDan, Spitfire, Jammy (and many others..) to name a few. It was just not the thrills of seeing the jeeps and jeepers into action into amazing terrains, but also the kind of sentiment that people have with these machines e.g. GTO’s thread on his classic. I really never could imagine how far one can go to get his passionate possession back to life!
It might sound bit exaggerating, but for around two-three weeks, day and night I literally lived in a sort of wonderland full of jeeps, jeeps and only jeeps all around. (However now I realize I was not the only one to go through such kind of phase!cheers
For the 1st time I could understand a bit why a jeep is so different from the rest of the genres in automobile arena. All of a sudden, all kinds of jeeps, including the old govt ones, plying in the roads started having a curious and enthusiastic look from my side. My colleagues, who use to travel with me, were bit surprised; whats the big deal in seeing Jeeps! After the initial hysteria got settled down a bit, I came back to reality and realized something: probably it will not be possible for me to stay away from getting hold of a Jeep!
To be continued……