Opinion: Interning at OVERDRIVE

They say, if you dream for something and work hard for it, you do get it one day. My stint in OVERDRIVE was no less than a dream, it was a dream come true. Believe me, the day I got the nod to join the OD office as an intern, I was on cloud nine. Even the thought of working with the enthusiasts, whom I have been following for past 11 years, was making me jittery.

Day one, I got acquainted with the team and the very next moment I was working on my first assignment, all credit to the accommodating nature of team OD. The very next day, I was rushing through the peak Pune traffic in the new BMW 328i, for the Rush Hour II story. It was an amazing experience, my first outing with the team where I got to see the enthusiasts on their respective set of wheels, tearing through the traffic to prove a point, whether two wheels or four wheels are best for the city rush hour traffic. What I learnt was how a story takes shape for the magazine, how testers reach their verdict and how the story is composed, designed, formatted, edited and printed in the magazine - yes and this was just the one story among so many that we read every month.

I was working harder and harder everyday to be at least at par, with the high standards of an efficient team. It was one of the best day of my internship (there are some more - read on), when I got to ride the KTM 200 Duke, Shumi's personal ride, and what a ride it was. The riding experience as I feel was like taming a mad bull, though actually the bike was taunting me for not riding it the way it was supposed to be ridden, it has immense potential but I was not potent enough to extract it completely due to the traffic, I would love to someday. I also got the keys of the best Bajaj I have ever ridden till date, the mighty Pulsar 200 NS. Of course KTM is faster and meaner, but the Pulsar lets you lose your senses on the track days and takes you to your office sensibly on the weekdays, without troubling you too much.

Anniversary issue closing date was near, so time to get serious about the work at hand. In that process I got to assist almost all the testers in the team some way or the other, and witnessed a weighty procedure of the magazine taking shape. It takes a clockwork co-ordination between the designers and the testers and many sleepless nights for the team, to bring out the projection of their passion and hard work on a bunch of papers. It's an exhausting and enduring process, but all the pain simply vanishes when the first of the printed issues arrives at the office. Never have I been so much delighted to turn through the pages of Overdrive magazine, simply because I can see my work in most of the stories evenif it was at minuscule level.

One of the best days of my internship happened when we travelled to Baramati for the 0-100-0 test. Yes I experienced the powerful drifts in the ferocious M5, awesome donuts in the astounding 640d, super luxurious ride in the humongous Q7 4.2 TDI, roar of the agile Mini Cooper, but none of these overpowering drives, in these astonishingly pricey beasts, made my day as much as another unbelievable occurrence on that morning. The story goes like this â€" on our way to Baramati we passed through my graduation college campus - MANET (which is located along the Pune - Solapur highway, after the Hadapsar Toll Naka, Pune). It was this very place where, some two years back I use to dream of the day when I would be driving with team OD on this very stretch of the smooth highway. An impractical idea for that time, considering the nature of my career discipline, for which I have even been laughed at my friends in the past, but it was actually happening in real. I must be dreaming for sure, I mean how your thoughts can turn out in exact realism. It was this priceless episode that made my day and was hard to sink in for many days to come.

I attended my first edit meeting for the October issue, and was asked to write about the series of tech pieces for the upcoming magazines. Technology is what I follow religiously and I grabbed that opportunity to pen down my knowledge (with the help of the team) for a magazine which I have been reading for past 11 years. Hard to express my feelings on paper, but when the first of my articles got printed in the October issue, all I can say is that I was almost in tears, glad that nobody noticed. I will be writing the tech pieces regularly and will do my best to join my name with Overdrive permanently.

Preparing race reports for the website, learning to work on the in-design software, conducting the fuel efficiency test for the two wheeler, working on my tech piece, assisting the team in their projects and many more learning activities, have all honed me well to progress on my passion in the years to come. The two month internship has shown me the path to my dream, only if I make myself worthy of it with rigorous practice and hard work. My internship hasn't ended; it has just started my foray into automobile industry, my cherished dream since I got my first Overdrive issue on January 2001. I want to be back on-board with the team again and will do whatever possible to make my dream come true again.

All the best to an inspiring team of enthusiasts. Thank you all guys.