There are thrills in an underpaid journalist’s life too. Here I was behind the wheel, riding a BMW on a runway made for the super-rich to fly down their private jets. The metallic-grey 6-Series, at 120 kmph, was flying off the face off the earth when the person sitting next to me asked me to slam the brakes. The man egging me on to such recklessness in breathtaking Aamby Valley, Lonavala, was not a psychopath with a gun at my head but a BMW expert.

When we—a bunch of other journalists and I—had driven up the serene, tree-lined incline to Aamby Valley for BMW’s two-day driving camp, it didn’t seem we’d run into such adventure. Forty-eight hours at the weekend getaway for crorepatis, was, I thought, about drooling at German beauties (the Beemers please) and taking them for a spin—not a crash course in well, crashing a BMW.

Concentrating on driving was, of course, more of a problem, given that we were in what is described in salesmen’s spiel as the “World’s Best City” and “Independent India’s first planned hill city”. Winding roads, beautiful cottages, cobbled paths. You might be forgiven for thinking you are in a Swiss canton. Not that anyone can walk in to Aamby Valley. You either need to own a villa there or should have received an invitation to visit the place—how else do you think a poor hack like me got there?

For the camp, BMW had converted the runway into a test drive track. There they stood, the entire range of BMWs, in a gleaming line from the airport gate to the runway. This was a car-lover’s jannat indeed. Now, for the camp. The experts began with the basics—the correct way to hold a steering wheel and the position the arm should be in when negotiating a turn. It wasn’t simple. Driving on Indian roads is a freewheeling exercise that chips away at your respect for rules. And changing your driving style can be challenging to say the least. The more resourceful among us even tried to wriggle their way out by saying the cars on Indian roads didn’t have the same sort of steering wheel. But there was no escape. Two parallel lessons we learnt: old habits die hard and that Indians aren’t the best drivers in the world. The boot camp was divided into three stages: the scenic drive, driver training and X-drive. Each group drove a set of BMW vehicles and then swapped them for other models. I guess you could say each of us has driven every BMW available in India.

... contd.