A paragliding adventure in the Datsun redi-GO

I was dragged a couple of metres behind as the glider I was strapped to caught a gust of wind and filled up with air. Soon enough, it was above my head, tugging at me like a dog trying to break free of its leash. All that was left to do was jump. I was on the steep face of a hill, one step forward and I would be airborne. “Go for it”, said the voice over the radio — my instructor had an eye on me from the landing zone a few hundred feet below. “Go for it!”, the voice in my head yelled over my every instinct of self preservation. I went for it. I heaved my body forward, took that step, felt nothing under my feet… but I wasn’t falling. The headwind kept the glider airborne and I was strapped in as it sailed through the air.

What in the world was I thinking? I’m going to be straight up honest here. We millennials aren’t living a particularly fulfilling life. We drag ourselves out of bed every morning, get to work, slog our backsides off through the day, drag ourselves back home, sleep and repeat. We live for the weekends — spend Saturday evenings in urban haunts filled with a copious amounts of intoxication, forced interactions, desperately in pursuit of a distraction from the mundane of the impending week. Why? Why do we settle for a life which is so banal?

No. We shouldn’t settle. We should get out there and live life like it is meant to be lived. We need to get out there and chase those moments that will brand themselves in our memory, remind us that life is more than just our jobs and our work. We need experiences that leave us refreshed, energised and ready to tackle the week, the month, the year head on, and still have the energy at the end of it all, to do it over again. Nothing does that better than a good ol’ shot of adrenaline. It gets you pumped, keeps your mind clear and primed for the imminent onslaught of responsibilities.

Welcome to the first part of our new series called #redi2GO, where we take a car aimed directly at the millennials, the Datsun redi-GO, out of the urban jungle and in to the open, making sure we get our monthly dose of adrenaline while we’re at it.

We were at Indus Paragliding in Kamshet and I had just spent the day under the expert guidance of Sanjay Pendurkar, the man who started Indus and is an accomplished paraglider himself. He has won a couple of national and international competitions, and has trained gliders from the Indian air-force. He knows his stuff and is probably the go-to guy if you want to pick up the sport from scratch.

Getting to the Indus base is real simple. Kamshet is a little town that lies on the old Mumbai-Pune highway, approximately 45km from Pune. Get on to the highway, turn off just before Kamshet town and head in to the Maharashtrian hinterland. Indus has got signboards up everywhere, and you’d do fine to just follow them. Else, you can punch it in to your smartphone and it will direct you right up to their doorstep. The redi-GO had absolutely no trouble getting up there. It has got a small engine and is built primarily for the city, but it can manage a fair amount of highway driving. A 45km stretch like this was a breeze. After turning off at Kamshet, the roads deteriorated. They were potholed and bumpy, but the little car had no trouble bumbling over it all. The suspension of the redi-GO is really pliant and is tuned perfectly for such roads. You don’t have to slow down too much, you can keep a reasonable speed and the suspension absorbs most of what comes its way.

The Indus base camp is a really cool place. It’s bang on the banks of the Uksan lake, and makes for a great place to come and relax by itself. Sanjay has got a paraglider simulator there, where he teaches you the basics of how to control it during take off and mid flight. His certificate courses take around four days each, and so he has a couple of rooms for guests to stay in. However, you can also just come for a day or two, unwind and enjoy a tandem ride with one of his instructors that requires no prior training (which is what I did).

After receiving my basic instruction at the camp, we drove out to one of the more popular gliding locations. The redi-GO swallowed both my glider and Sanjay’s after we flipped the rear seat down. On the way there Sanjay told me some real interesting stuff about paragliding. Turns out, Kamshet is a hotspot for paragliding not just in India, but across the world. Paragliding has a lot to do with wind patterns. They need to be of a specific speed, blowing in a certain direction and this needs to be consistently so. In Europe, the winds are unpredictable and a course that takes four days in India could take months to complete elsewhere. People from all over the world come to Kamshet to learn the ropes of paragliding. I didn’t know that — we’ve got something so cool happening right in our backyard and I was oblivious to it.

The redi-GO really surprised me on the way to the gliding location, which has to be far off from roads and buildings; if the winds turn unfavourable and the paraglider misses his landing, he’d be a hazard to people. The redi-GO was more than comfortable crawling over rocks and through slush en route. Its wheels are pushed to the ends of the car and that results in good approach and departure angles. The short wheelbase means it has a decent ramp over angle and it’s light, so the small engine isn’t struggling to pull it over obstacles. It pottered over everything we threw at it without scraping anywhere. I never thought I’d take a hatchback like this off-roading! But that’s the whole point of this story. When you’re starting out in life, you’re on your first job, and you’re just about scraping through with your expenditure every month, you don’t have the means to buy a big SUV with AWD. But that sure as hell doesn’t mean you cannot go out and have an adventure. I was having a blast in one of the most affordable cars in the country, and it was showing no signs of stopping. No powerful engine. No all-wheel drive. Just smart design and the will to push yourself beyond the ordinary.

Right, but back to the paragliding. It is a paradox of feelings — exhilarating, but immensely calming at the same time. Once you’re up in the sky, you’re enveloped by a blanket of silence. You’re just floating, allowing the wind to take you as high as it pleases. You’re completely cut off from the chaos of the world below and it is a great release. You’ve got to understand how birds fly, take cues from them on how the wind is blowing, try keeping yourself airborne for as long as possible — that’s the rush. Perfect it and you can do it for insane distances, enjoying the solitude. Sanjay’s personal record is 300km. Flying is as addictive as driving, and I’m coming back very soon, to do it again.

You can find out more about Indus Paragliding on their website www.indusparagliding.in or call Sanjay on +91 9869083838 / 7798111000