Part 1

Play it LOGAN Introducing the Logan Play that we drove to three different cities in a bid to challenge the Rajdhani's time and cost.

The Mahindra Renault Logan was a game changer from the day it was launched. It shook up the entry level sedan market. Essentially a Dacia, an east-European brand which Renault owns, the Logan was specifically designed for emerging markets, like India. It is priced at the level of larger hatches, but offered much more. Plenty of interior space, thanks mainly to its wide body, a full sized boot and a frugal, yet powerful diesel engine. The car’s sedate looks however didn’t go down well. In a bid to win over the younger crowd, Renault has now launched a sportier version of the Logan, called the Play. And this is the car we will use as the Logan Express to challenge the Rajdhani.

The cosmetic changes are inspired by the Renault Megane R26.R sport, a hot version of the Megane built in homage to Renault’s on track activities. The Play edition adds race credo to the street car. Like the R26.R, there are large, geometric pattern racing style decals all around and the car has been fitted with red alloy wheels. Of course those not so flamboyant can opt for a safer silver set. There is also a subtle spoiler and chrome exhaust tip that adds to the sporty feel. To keep the theme from getting disrupted, the Play only comes in black or white.

The interiors too get a sporty makeover. The first feature that catches the eye is the black leather seats. These feature a distinctive red stripe down the centre and red stitching, which goes well with the sporty theme. The floor mats too, are black with red piping. The gearshift knob gets some chrome detailing, and the centre console is now black. Another neat additional feature is the new Driver Information System (DIS). This system is integrated into the display housed within the instruments that shows the fuel and odometer. The DIS is an add-on to the odo giving variousjourney information and fuel figures. Itlets you know the approximate range,the efficiency as well as serving as a trip computer. All information can be scrolled using a stalk that is easy to operate while on the go. The Play also gets a Kenwood audio system with USB connectivity and four rear mounted parking sensors. A welcome addition is the internal boot release. The Play features no mechanical changes, and is available in both 1.5L diesel and 1.4L petrol engines. It is priced at Rs 5.94 to Rs 6.79 lakh (ex-showroom, Delhi).

Leaving early in the morning helps us go faster and cover more distance as the world continues to sleep.

No Kolkata picture is complete without the hand pulled rickshaws. This was surely the most adventurous homecoming I have ever had. Even my family was stunned by the feat

Trying to get a train ticket, especially on the Rajdhani, during the festive season is no joke. Airlines too price their tickets frightfully expensive. So there is just one option – drive down to Kolkata.

We leave from our Noida office with Vikrant and Siddhraj at an unearthly 4:28am. The roads at this hour are empty and we take full benefit and clip through to Mathura and stop by the Indian oil refinery just as daylight emerges. It is a brilliant sight to see the chimney bellowing fire, while having a burger. Meanwhile the Logan with the 1.5-diesel on board is going on full steam, except for times when suddenly an imbecile, still unawake, trundles onto the road with a bottle in hand.

As the car speeds along the 99.9 per cent complete Golden Quadrilateral, one by one, we decide to explore the Logan. Having three in the car means the back seat can be used as a bed. Just fold your leg and get yourself a pillow. Sure it isn’t as comfy as the bunk on the Rajdhani, but it is good enough for powernaps

Just past 9am we cross Sikandra, around 390km from Noida, and are speeding towards Kanpur. Siddhraj pulls out some delicious home-made cheese and butter sandwiches. Some packets of chips and biscuits accompany the sandwiches.

Ahead lay Kanpur bypass which isn’t just another massive 4-laned highway. This bypass is a flyover! So once you are on it, there’s no way you can get off before it finishes.

The Allahabad bypass, which was yet to be completed when we were chasing time around the Golden Quadrilateral a few months ago, is now operational and is a welcome sight since we can avoid going into town.

We enter Bihar after 11 and a half hours. As we blitz through Bihar, we see a board for ‘Aurangabad’! No, this isn’t the one in western India where Skodas are made. Siddhraj decides, “they might be making the fake ones here!”

In Jharkhand we face torrential rains and visibility is reduced drastically. Adding to our woes certain sections of the highway, part of the Golden Quadrilateral, are unfinished. Here the brilliant ride qualities of the Logan help peter shocks down.

We finally enter Bengal as the downpour continues, the headlamp trying hard to illuminate the road ahead. A resident of Kolkata, I have done this route numerous times yet I am astonished at how much the roads have improved. We speed on towards Durgapur, and then on to Panagarh. The roads here though are nearly devoid of the top layer. Panagarh incidentally is a huge market for disposed army vehicles. Progress goes down rapidly as weget stuck in a mammoth truck traffic jam. Our comfort lead in jeopardy, we try and make up time, WRC style.

Things get better from Palsit, where the Durgapur Expressway begins. We fly past Singur, famous for… er… not making the Nano. Approaching Kolkata, we take the Kona Expressway and reach a sign board saying ‘Exit to Vidyasagar Setu’. We cross over to Kolkata via the magnificent hanging bridge over the Gangawith the old Howrah bridge and the railway station to our left. Fifteen minutes later, we are home, having beaten the best of the Indian Railways in a common man's car.

Part 2

We have returned from the Kolkata leg the night before, and having beaten the Rajdhani, are jubilant. We cando the same today. But, there’s still some nervousness. That I would be meeting my parents after a long time, is only part of the reason. The main cause for the unrest is that we have to clock almost similar mileage but in less time.

To make things more challenging, we have the full quota of load on board – four people and a boot full of luggage. More weight naturallytranslates into slower acceleration.

However, there are a few positives to look up to. That the Logan is phenomenally efficient means we will stop fewer times for fuel and hence save time.

0430hrs. It’s dark and none of us have slept too well, not with the issue work going on in full swing. The plan now is to get out of Delhi and then to Gurgaon and on to NH8 towards Jaipur as soon as possible and avoid most of the highway traffic, both vehicles and people.

An hour later, things seem to be going according to plan. We are already past Manesar and are averaging 62kmph. We’d naturally have to go a lot faster if we wishto beat the Rajdhani.

Close to 0800hrs we hit the Jaipur bypass. The worst on the northern side of the trip is over. The road from Delhi to Jaipur is one of the most congested on this route and with surprises in the form of potholes, animals crossing roads and truckers sleeping on the wheel. What one needs is a car with good ride quality and a planted feel especially over broken tarmac. The Logan manages all this with aplomb. It also managed decent fuel economy given that the throttle was almost always pressed to the floor.

1030hrs. Past Jaipur, the road turns into a six-laned highway with very few breaks in the dividers. This, thankfully, means less instances of motorcyclists and tractors coming barreling down through the breaks right into your path. Our average speed in the meantime has climbed quite significantly. We are now doing 92.5kmph!

Minutes later, we leave NH8 to join NH79 onwards to Chittorgarh. This is part of the Golden Quadrilateral and is relatively empty of traffic. Well, it used to be, because today the route, a little less than 200km is pretty busy with truck traffic. So, we have to brake a lot more and to get back to cruising speed are revving the daylights out of the Logan. No wonder we are only averaging 13.2kmpl.

An hour and a half later we rejoin NH8 at Udaipur. A quick calculation tells us, we have not only managed to keep our average speed up, but bettered it; we are now doing 93.7kmph, in a 1.5-litre, 65bhp Logan. Awesome.

1601hrs. Four hours from Udaipur and we hit Vadodara. We have just been on one the finest roads in this part of the country. The road from Udaipur to Shamlaji (in Gujarat) is a lovely blend of fast and tight corners. The surface is ever changing too; at places it is flat like a board and moments later, thanks to stone carrying overloaded trucks there are deep trench like depressions. The Logan with four people and a boot full of luggage, struggled a bit through the section. Its lazy turn in, the need to work the steering hard for it to keep up with constant corners and its wallowing wasn't so enjoyable. It’s also not great at high speeds and its light and vague steering makes the car feel nervous. And it did scare us a bit on the endless Ahmedabad-Vadodara expressway.

Vadodara has also marked the end of a great drive to Mumbai in the past. However, now with the Vadodara-Baruch six-laned Superway in operation, we continue our pace for another 100km.

2130hrs. Nearly 330km later, we are in Mumbai, outside my apartment, 17 hrs and 5 minutes after we left our office in Noida. It is the fastest Delhi-Mumbai run we have ever done averaging a little less than 88kmph. We however expected that we’d reach earlier, particularly given that by the time we exited Baruch we were averaging 93.5kmph.

But just as we hit Surat, there was rain so heavy we were hardly able to see ahead. And then there were deep puddles to deal with as well which had us aquaplaning all over the place.

And as if we hadn’t lost enough time already, Maharasthra greeted us with roads so poor, Bihar and MP would have been proud. The potholed roads continued and so did our drop in average speed till we reached the suburbs of Mumbai.

Part 3

Mahindra-renault Logan Play -Scenic sunset enroute, in Lakhandon, MP.

A day's worth of travel later, halfway down India, lay our destination. The city that the Nizams built, steeped in rich history and known for its equally rich cuisine – Hyderabad. Our final destination of our three pronged Rajdhani challenge. Hyderabad is another Rajdhani destination, its another city one should be visiting and is approximatly in the same distance range from Delhi as Mumbai and Kolkata, only south.

The chosen train was the 2438 Secunderabad Rajdhani, that leaves Delhi’s Hazrat Nizamuddin station at 8.50am and ends at the Secunderabad station on the next day at 6.35am. Secunderabad caters to Hyderabad area. On the way the express train stops at Jhansi, Bhopal and Nagpur. Our journey too, would be similar. We were to start fromour Noida main office, join the North-South corridor at Delhi heading south passing Agra, Jhansi, Gwalior, Nagpur and down to Hyderabad.

Our journey began in the wee hours of the morning, 4:20am to be exact. Passing Delhi and we find ourselves contending with large numbers of trucks making their way past the sleeping city. It’s always time consuming, and one has to be extra careful of the un-illuminated hazards. The road on towards Agra is a great piece of tarmac, though bypassing some of the villages would have helped. It takes us about three hours to complete this stretch, and turn off for the Agra bypass, towards Gwalior and Jhansi. The Agra to Gwalior bit is some of the best we encounter throughout the trip, baring Dholpur city. Post Gwalior, and the 4-lane ends and we are subjected to narrow 2-lane highways, with some stretches of one side of the completed 4-laning. With the recent rainfall across the country, the road has deteriorated quite badly, and the softer sprung and higher Logan is having a tougher time than the BMW 3-series and Audi A4 we had driven on the very same stretch four months ago.

Despite the horrendous road conditions, the Logan journeys on taking a good beating in the process. Our backs too are having a torrid time, as the Logan seats arequite uncomfortable both in front and behind. Sleeping comfortably is out of the picture. We manage to reach Sagar in Madhya Pradesh by 2:00pm, by then the car has guzzled down nearly a full tank of diesel and we have done about 620 odd kilometres.

Mahindra-Renault Logan Play -The final stretch to Hyderabad is a superbly surfaced four-lane highway. The Logan Express with the Char Minar in Hyderabad.

With no time to waste, we set our sights upon the next big town, and hopefully the end of the bad roads – Nagpur. But we still have a lot to cover before then. More than half of Madhya Pradesh still remains, and the road conditions are not getting any better. Our only solace is the changing scenery. The starkness of the Chambal valley starts to get a lot greener and as we go further south the orests begin to appear. The recent bout of rains is quite evident throughout, with lakes, streams and rivers all teaming with water. We also pass the might Narmada river, which is narrow where we cross it due to the stone banks.

As we draw closer to Nagpur, we pass through the very thick forests that provided the back drop to Rudyard Kipling’s famous tales – Jungle Book. Nagpur, onthe other has been a stark contrast. The concrete jungle is the geographical centre of India, but on a Friday night all we can seedotted on the side of the highway is the word ‘Bar’ in neon.

Past Nagpur, and there is no relief. The roads are still terrible, and the dark night isn’t helping our case. The roads continue to be full of diversions, with the 4-laning still under construction. It is only after we cross into Andhra Pradesh that the roads start to improve. Just after crossing the bifurcation for Nizamabad the roads finally become a full fledged toll road with proper four-laning. This thankfully continues all the way to Hyderabad, for the roads have taken their toll on us. The 1,572km distance that we covered feels so much harder and exhausting than a similar 1,500kmthat I had done a week earlier to Kolkata. We have reached our destination at 4:00am, 23hrs 40mins after we left our Noida office. This was almost two hours behind the Rajdhani’s 21hrs 45mins. But if you factor in the average journey time to andfrom the station to be at least an hour each way, then we have equalled, if not beaten, that time. And once the roads had been completed, this time can only get much shorter and the drive more pleasurable and less exhausting than it is now.

Of course with the Secunderabad Rajdhani only plying once a week from the national capial, and airline ticket prices going to astronomical levels, we hope that the road project gets completed soon.