Kashmir to KanyaKumari, on Ungeared scooters? Has anyone done it before? Should we do it? Why not do it on geared, large wheeled, bikes? Eh? I've already done it twice before on geared, large wheeled, bikes, that's why! Did it on Kinetic K4-100 in 1999 and on Kinetic Challenger in 2001. So why not do something different? Say, like on un-geared scooters, on which, like Captain Kirk (Star Trek) says, "no man has done before"!

I'd been doing speed and braking tests on a sparsely trafficked stretch of the Pune-Bombay bypass along with a few teenagers for some months now, and had gotten quite friendly with them. They knew of my work and that I had done K2K twice before, and also that I'd ridden the KiHo across the Sahara Desert around the time they were just entering school. And they kept asking me, "Sir, let's do something big". I thought that if I could take these teenagers on a kind of Bharat Yatra, it would squarely round off their education. Bookish knowledge never completes education. Now Kashmir to KanyaKumari (K2K) is not a small distance. I know. I've done it twice before. It is @ 4000 km. This would take a lot of time, energy, effort and money. Time, energy and effort, all of us had aplenty, but money? Ah, that would be a problem. The boys were keen and looked to me for raising the resources required for this adventure. I activated my resource chain, and of the people I tapped, Kinetic looked inclined. It took a few meetings to thrash out the details, and the die was cast. The bike chosen was the Kinetic NOVA gearless 100cc scooter. Kinetic gave us three of these as well as other back up. We were all set.

The boys, all students, were all from middle-class, Marathi-speaking, "Puneri" background, just ending their teens. The shortest (and fattest) was Harshal Bankar (80 kg), a final year Auto Engg. Diploma student at, Dnyaneshwar Vidyapeeth's, Institute of Studies in Technology in Pune. Tallest (almost six-foot) was Bhardwaj Jadhav, Sea-Cadet, just finishing Pre-Sea training on Training Ship 'Rehman'. The other two were Hrishikesh Kolapkar, classmate of Harshal Bankar mentioned above, and Kiran Chitnis, in the first year of the three year Bachelor of Computer Science course. All of them,though currently pursuing different courses, were earlier classmates in class XII in Pune.

We had arrived at Patnitop on Dec. 4th evening to start southwards next morning. Patnitop was bloody cold! Minus temperatures. All mountains around us were white with snow. Sleeping accommodation was difficult to find, since this was off-season, and most hotels were boarded up and closed for winter. After driving around for almost two hours after dark, we managed to find a hotel, which was open. We piled on. But for me, sleep was elusive. I am not used to sleeping at temperatures @ minus five Celcius. In spite of wearing three pajamas under two pants below the waist and three full sleeved thick T-shirts under two full sleeved woollen jerseys and a thick jacket on top of all these, and lying under the thickest "Razai" I've ever seen, I could not fall asleep. I think my blood was frozen. I took no pictures. I could not. My fingers were frozen. I think even my camera was frozen.

I was awake the whole 4th night and was extremely happy to leave this icy place the next day. I thawed my fingers and un-froze my blood on a log fire in the hotel compound and did the mandatory filling-up-the-petrol-tank up to the mark I had made in the neck of each of the three scooters, about one inch below the rim. After filling up to the mark, I would shake each scooter vigorously front-to-back as well as side-to-side at least a dozen times to get rid of air trapped in the tank, and the petrol level would go down. I would again pour petrol into the tank up to the mark and shake again as above. I had to do this shaking process on each scooter at least four to five times till the petrol level stopped going down no matter how much I shook the scooter, meaning thereby that there were no more air bubbles in the tank. At this point, I noted the km reading on the odometer.

After riding to the next destination, the first thing I always did as soon as we stopped, even before stepping into the hotel lobby, was to again fill up the tank(s) of each scooter up to the mark, and repeat the shaking-and-topping-up procedure and noting the odometer reading before doing anything else. We had accurate measuring flasks and I measured the quantity (litres) of petrol filled in each scooter at every nigh halt. (Petrol filled was always from the nearest local petrol pump of any company, no particular company or brand). Thus I would know very accurately, EXACTLY how much petrol was consumed. The distance over which this amount of petrol was consumed was known by the difference between the odo readings at the destination and at the starting point. Dividing the km distance by the amount of petrol consumed gave me the fuel average for each sector.