Tripping towards Amritsar – as part of Ford’s ‘One Tank, One classic story, 1500Kms’

Some days back I had been asking twitter folks for suggestions of places for a road trip. The reason for initiating that was the fact that I have been invited to be a part of Ford India’s “One Tank. One Classic Story. 1500 Kms” drive. This is a 4-6 days drive (10th Aug-16th Aug) which is a unique opportunity for a few select participants to explore and share the various facets of the trip along a 1500 Kms drive in soon to-be launched Ford Classic Titanium.

There are 9 teams comprising of experts in genres which are: music, Bollywood, fashion, art, photography, cricket, food, technology, magic. These chosen participants would be accompanied by a multimedia team to discover and share interesting tid-bits as web episodes jointly developed by the team. I have been chosen as the participant under the ‘photography’ category. Accompanying me on this drive would be Suruchi – a filmmaker from NID. I have come up with the name “Shutterspeeders” for our team :).

As some of you on twitter might have guessed by my tweets, my chosen destination is Amritsar and I would like to see the ‘Change of guard’ at the Wagah border. I have wanted to go there since a long time, but never did due to a full time job and then later due to shoot schedules. Well, now is the time to strike off this to-do from the bucket list. I am hoping that the ‘change of guard’ on 15th August would be even more magnificent than usual and that I would be able to view it right from where it happens . I wish there had been some way to meet our Pakistani twitter counterparts right there, but sadly it is not possible. All we can do is “wave” at each other if at all. The journey would start from Gurgaon. I plan to visit Bhangarh – a place popular as a “haunted spot”, Panipat, Chandigarh and eventually reach Amritsar. My initial plan included visiting McLeodGanj but I cancelled it due to the cloud burst at Manali, the long distance between Amritsar and McLeodGanj which would have to be negotiated on hilly roads and not flat highways, slippery roads due to expected rain, potential danger of landslides etc. I had done a lot of research on various locations for a road trip, but most got ruled out due to the weather not being right for visiting those places. But now I do have a repository of places I would like to visit.

As part of the drive, we were briefed by Ford India on driving safety and other aspects of the exercise. We also got to meet all the other participants in various categories. The route and the tentative stories were discussed jointly with the influencers and the multimedia teams. The flag off would be happening at various locations of the participants. In my case that location would be Gurgaon.

Along the route, certain parts of the drive/ “Classic Story” may be crowdsourced from the people following the drive – that could be YOU! And you may have a role in shaping up my journey and also assisting me in certain tasks – for eg. suggesting places for a pit stop, or suggesting viable routes etc.

In order to shape up the Classic story I would be generating a lot of photography/video content. My endeavour (no pun intended Ford India!) would be to share salient features of the road trip and make it engaging, fun and most worthy for the viewers. There might be a contest thrown in too, if time & logistics permit!
There may be select offline meet-ups along the route as well. In order to do all this I’ve been provided with an iPad (for keeps). A 3G connection has been taken by me in order to maximise the utilisation of the iPad along the way.

The purpose of this post is not just to talk about my road trip but also my perspective on being part of an event like this. My plan is to share interesting trivia about my trip, without spamming ppl’s timeline. The hashtag for the event is #1tankfull but I am NOT planning to use it for every single tweet I write. There would be some updates about the road trip with the hashtag and there would also be some of the stuff (sans hashtag) that I usually write when I travel anywhere. As a matter of fact most of the times I travel anywhere I use a personal hashtag for my travel tweets so as to collate all of them later. For the record, this is NOT a contest or a paid event. There are no prizes for anything & there is no expected tweeting frequency from Ford – which was one of the first & most important things I confirmed before responding in the affirmative to their invite a month back. Here’s hoping for clear skies, pretty locales & interesting experiences. I hope you would enjoy “virtual traveling” with me as much as I would on road. Go Shutterspeeders!