WHEN a man talks about his machine, it is never a routine affair. A gamut of emotions, passion, pride and individuality are involved in it. A machine defines a man’s personality. One person who revs up personalities is avant-garde auto designer Dilip Chhabria, who pursued a degree in Transportation Design from the Art Centre of Design, USA.
Q. How and when did your passion with automobiles begin?
A. The fascination was there from a very early age. My parents were quite indulgent. I was not indoctrinated to just do my homework and forget about everything else. They gave me freedom. That fuelled my interest further in automobile.
Q. Which school did you go to? Do you remember any teacher in particular?
A:. I studied at Hill Range, Peder Road Bombay. It was not a conventional, disciplinarian type of school and allowed freeinteraction between students and teachers. That really helped me open up. I remember Mrs. Pastakia and Mr. Saxena in particular as they were enlightened and didn’t treat us like kids, which was refreshing. While my school played a very important part, my college (Art Centre of Design) was a brand to make me employable.
Q. Is our independence from oil for fuel an achievable target?
A. There is a desire and momentum for an alternative fuel. But the answer is no because vehicles running on other kinds of fuel are not economically viable.
Q. What message do you have for those who want a career in this sector?
A. The automotive industry is growing at 30 percent y-o-y in the last couple of years, will continue to grow 30 percent every year and this growth has given rise to manpower demand in designing, engineering, marketing, servicing .So, there is a huge potential for the next 20 years. We have our own college now -
DYPDC Center for Automotive Research and Studies for UG and PG programmes.
Q. Are you satisfied with the quality of knowledge possessed by students passing out of engineering colleges?
A. No. None of the engineering colleges is really imparting any education. Students have the hunger, they have to be led. Students have been done a big disservice by our educators, our system, and our government in making the system rigid. Unless we change that I don’t foresee my vision, of Indian design dominating world automobile landscape, coming soon. We have to empower students; colleges then we should have the flexibility to create new courses because the world is a changed place now. You can’t have AICTE dictating what course to follow because these people don’t even know what they are talking about.
Q. You have customised many a vehicle with your ingenuity. Which project was the most challenging?
A. All projects are challenging. We work on 40 different projects at any given time. But we don’t take any project with overconfidence. We have to create a product which is a ‘wow’. For instance, we just delivered a new ambassador to a customer in Delhi. That represented lot of challenge because we had to bring up-to- date a design to a car, which has not been attempted for the last 50 years, yet not deviate and lose the car’s essence or DNA.