For the want of better writing skills I haven’t really contributed much to this blog even after incessant urging from Arun. But I guess the time has come to make this more interesting to all of you that spend your precious time in visiting our site and of course, making donations

The theme of my first post is anybody’s guess. How I got involved and what I think of the whole thing…

I remember Arun making a passing mention of Mongol Rally, back in 2007 in one of our rare online conversations. I thought it was cool but neither of us was too serious about it. At least, I wasn’t. Then a few months ago an excited Arun tells me that he signed up for the rally. He had no team mates and sounded clueless as to how he was going to do this. He had a car alright, but that was it. In one of those very common impulsive decision moments I said, why not, I will join. Contrary to Arun, I have always thought this is much easier and much more fun than the gruesome task it is made out to be. (A different opinion is taking shape in my mind now that we started. We will come to that in a later post as to why this is indeed difficult.)

As nonchalantly as I agreed to the whole rally, I did not really think that it was a firm commitment. I have to give it to Arun that if he hadn’t followed up properly with me, this rally would have just been another point in my to-do list. So, after a few more “you sure you will do this da”s from Arun I firmly committed myself to it. So, there it was. Two of us and we had a team.)

After that every now and then we will chat and throw some ideas at each other and then not speak to each other again for a few weeks. During one of those discussions, we started talking about more team mates. Arun was firmly against the idea. Since he wants to take a supply of a 1000 litres of water to fuel him, a 1000 litres of petrol to fuel the small car and a few nuclear missiles to ward off the dangerous camels in the Gobi, we had no room left in the car to take any more team members. We had a funny chat session of calculations of boot space, amount of water consumed by an average person in a day and the probability of not finding a single human habitat in a 600km radius. I have been rightly accused of having unhealthy disrespect for dangerous situations and thought Arun was crazy. And since that thought was true, I didn’t have much difficulty in convincing him that the expression “the more the merrier” has some merit to it. (I couldn’t convince him to drive through Afghanistan with me though. Now that would have been fun.

We set out finding team members and found one each in Raja and Jose. Once we had four people, the idea cooled down again for a couple of weeks before the lovely Miss Kristie jumped up and said she wanted to do it along with a childhood friend of her. Now, now, how could I ever say no to a girl?

So, here we are, a motley crew of 6 trying to figure out how to go about the whole driving for 6 weeks thing. What is most striking to me about our team and I also think is different from any other is that we have signed up for this rally without ever having met half our team. The last time I met Arun was three years ago by chance in Frankfurt airport. I have never met Jose or Sangeetha. I see Raja once, may be, every two years and Kristie on my way in and out of Amsterdam. Raja hasn’t met anyone in the team except me; Jose hasn’t met anyone in the team except Arun, etc…It simply is crazy to sign up for a rally where we have to share the same small (mind you, it’s only 1.2L) car for six weeks together in one of the roughest terrains in the world. For all I know, one of us might be puking all the way to Mongolia, given the inevitable and unbearable smell of sweat coming from four other unknown people. As for me, I will be dozing off as usual for six weeks, next to a window…

To be continued when I wake up….