THE LAST STRIKE

Seeing out the tumultous year of 2020 with a bang – chasing snow, sand and the sea on one final road trip

- AATISH MISHRA

FIVE THOUSAND KILOMETRES. IF YOU HAD told me back in April that I’d pull off a 5000km road trip before the year ended, I’d have laughed at you, picked up another bag of chips and gone back to binging whatever I was binging on Netflix. Back then, stepping out to the grocery store required more planning than a mission to the moon. And yet, I type this out having returned from doing exactly that — a 10-day drive across eight states. As the restrictions around the country eased, we started pushing the boundaries of what we could do. It started with single-day photo and video shoots in the hills around the evo India HQ in Pune. Food was packed from home since restaurants were still shut. Press cards and serious faces were flashed when cops chanced upon us. The roads were eerily empty — brilliant for our shoots, but unnerving all the same. Slowly, we began venturing further. Two-day trips. Three-day trips. Four-day trips. Just enough to bag the content we needed for a story and hustle back home. And then came the big one. The Hyundai Great India Drive.

The Great India Drive is now tradition — last year we took the Venue exploring the north-east. Unity was the message and football was the messenger. But this year was different. It was far simpler, far less complicated. It was about pushing the boundaries of what we thought possible as little as six months ago. About rediscovering the joy of a long road trip. The first two days were eventful, but unrelated to this story. They involved road blocks, a north Indian trucker fluent in Marathi, a missing yellow supercar with a flat tyre, and a boss that was hell bent on finding it. But those two days were mostly about covering ground — getting from Pune to Delhi as fast as we could, where the Hyundai i20 was waiting for me.