Imagine riding a motorcycle for more than 9,000 km of treacherous terrain under brutal conditions and inhospitable weather through jungle tracks, salt flats and sand dunes. For 14 days straight. Without any electronic navigation. And you not only have to make it alive to the destination, but also make it there fast. Now imagine doing it for a living.
Welcome to CS Santosh's wacky world. The first Indian to compete in the Dakar Rally, he is now bracing for his third appearance in the event in January 2017. Having traditionally been staged in Africa -- and being known as Paris-Dakar -- the rally underwent a continental shift in 2009 after the earlier edition had to be called off due to security concerns. But even now the Dakar has some of the world's best riders traversing through South America in the most gruelling motorsport event on the planet.
"It takes big b***s," Santosh, 32, says with a deep voice and a smile that reaches his eyes. "And, of course, an element of lunacy."
An unlikely inspiration lies at the heart of Santosh's choosing an unchartered course in life for himself: Sabeer Bhatia, founder of Hotmail and, like Santosh, an alumni of St Joseph's, Bangalore. "When I was in school, I wanted to be the next Sabeer Bhatia," he says. "I used to think, 'Wow, this guy is really cool.' I knew I wanted to do something adventurous in life and when I got a motorcycle to go to college it was just pure freedom for me."
Starting out with riding his motorcycle on empty grounds and dry lake beds, Santosh discovered his love for off-road racing. He rode with TVS Racing for about a decade, becoming the Supercross champion four times. In 2006, he won the Al-Ain Motocross in Dubai.
In 2012, in his first attempt, he won the Raid de Himalaya in record time. Two years later he won the Desert Storm Rally, also in his maiden attempt, and went on to win its two subsequent editions as well.
Santosh was breaking new ground but sponsors were unwilling to risk their money on a man they hadn't heard much about and one who was bidding to participate in an event -- the Dakar Rally -- they knew little of. About 100,000 euros (Rs 70 lakh) was what it cost a rider to enter the rally. With friends and family pooling in, Santosh became the first Indian to compete in the Dakar in January 2015. Battling a shoulder injury, bleeding nose and a toe fracture, he finished 36th.
"You don't really know what to expect," he says. "And considering we don't know much about the Dakar in India and there are very few people who've done it from Asia [either], it's a huge unknown. For me, there was a lot of pressure to finish the first Dakar since I was a privateer who had made it there with support from friends and family. I didn't really think about being the first Indian to finish and all that. It's just that by default I became the first Indian. I wanted to finish for myself but also I knew that it was the one shot I had. If I didn't finish, I'd slip into oblivion. Nobody would care."
The following year, riding a Suzuki 450 rally bike, Santosh had to retire in the fourth stage of the Dakar after the navigation tower on his vehicle broke.
This time, on board the Hero MotoSports team, Santosh will be riding an upgraded version of the Speedbrain 450 rally bike. "As an athlete, corporate support means everything," he says. "In sport you don't want to have the undue pressure of not knowing whether you will have a next event at all."
In 2013 a near-fatal accident at the World Cross Country Rally Championship left Santosh with third-degree burns after his bike caught fire. The scars on his neck are still prominent and deep. "I've now stopped putting my bike on fire," he says with a laugh. "When I look at the top guys, they're crazy because in cross-country rallying you don't really know the course. It's not like it's a closed circuit where you know where you're going and you learn the corners. Today in the Dakar, everybody is trying to go as fast as they can on roads and terrain they've never seen before."
Spread across 12 stages, the January 2-14 race will begin in Paraguay, a fresh addition to the rally, before heading to Argentina, climbing into Bolivia and then returning to the Argentinean capital, Buenos Aires, for the finish. It will spend about 10 days at altitudes sometimes touching 4,000m, largely in Bolivia.
"It's like an action movie," Santosh says. "For 14 days it's like a circus moving from one place to another and it's incredible because you don't have time for anything. Since altitude will form a large part of the race this time, I'm planning to train in the Himalayas before heading to the Dakar."
The two marathon stages in the Dakar often prove to be important, he says. Split over two days, in a marathon stage riders cannot seek the help of their assistance teams and are expected to independently handle the mechanics of their machine. But competitors are permitted to help each other.
"You have to go out there and compete bearing in mind that it's not a one-day or a 10km stage where you go all out and sprint," says Santosh. "You need to keep in mind that it's a 14-day event and you need to first and foremost finish the rally. If you can pace yourself, minimize mistakes, manage marathon stages, make it back and put a good race together with good speed, you have a good result."
Only second to a rider's machine during a rally is the road book. Minus electronic navigation, it's a scroll of paper, primitive yet indispensable, that riders pore over to make sense of the unknown terrain that lies before them. It's one support that brings a bit of method to the madness. Every night when the riders return to the camping area, also known as the bivouac, they are handed a rolled-up road book that uses a lexicon of its own -- for instance, the symbol '!!!' indicates a dangerous section of the trail -- to spell out waypoints and dangers that lie ahead.
On an average, riders cover 700km daily. "You race, come back, prepare your road book and are again out racing early next morning," Santosh says, "It takes three hours on an average to go through the road book and prepare for the next day. You're not left with time for much else."
Preparations -- including extensive training both on and off the motorcycle -- kick in at least six months before the Dakar. "I'm already in Dakar mode," he says. "Right through the day, even during meals and while on the gym bicycle, I'm playing it out in my mind and trying to simulate conditions. You need to be in your best physical condition when you head there. Because those 14 days will break you down. You basically build yourself to go there and be destroyed."
About 70 people have lost their lives in the Dakar Rally since 1979, a fair indication of the high degree of risks involved in the event. Here in India, 47-year-old biker Subhamoy Paul fell to his death in the third leg of the Raid de Himalaya on October 11, forcing the organizers to call off the race.
Santosh hints that the organizers in India should work around constraints -- geographical location of the Himalayas, which hosts the Raid de Himalaya, and the close proximity to the Line of Control in case of the Desert Storm Rally in Rajasthan -- to make rallies safer. "As a rider when you're racing in the desert or anywhere else, at the back of your mind you don't want to worry about what's going to happen in case you crash. When I went from an Indian event to an international one, I noticed the difference. In international rallies, I know if I crash, they have a GPS and a sentinel on the bike who relays a message through satellite and there'd be a medical evacuation chopper within eight minutes."
Off-road racing, unlike track racing, is more about the man and less about the machine, he says. "In track racing, like Formula One and Moto GP, the team and machine is more important," Santosh says. "In rallying though, I would say it's 50-50. You may not have the fastest bike but you can still be fast. You may not have the best team but you can still be competitive."
This year Santosh has another Indian -- TVS's KP Aravind -- joining him in what has so far been a lonely ride at the Dakar. "We used to race together at TVS," Santosh says. "He's one of the most talented bikers in India. When I did my first Dakar, I was the only Indian guy. But when you're the only person in something, you're sort of an endangered species and it's not good for the ecosystem. Now, there's Aravind. I hope there're more of us because there's lot of space for me, him and everybody else."
Santosh's journey isn't free from moments of self-doubt, loathing or despair. But with each battle against despondent thoughts he finds the will to hold out a little longer. "There are times when you're sitting on the motorcycle and wondering why are you even doing this, going through all this pain and torture," he says. "And you just say to yourself that sometimes in life you may not enjoy what you're doing but you just get through with it. Because at the end of the day when you make it, there's a reward in store."