Two Guys And a Car

Twenty-seven-year-old Puneet Sharma was on his evening stroll in November 2017 when he first saw Wasim Mansoori’s broken Maruti 800. He stopped dead in his tracks. It was love at first sight.

Sharma, from an engineering background, and 24-year-old Mansoori, with years of experience in his father’s garage in Madhya Pradesh’s Barwani, started talking about what they could do with the car’s broken bonnet. They decided to replace it with a new one, which took about 20 days. Sharma did a walk through video on his Samsung J6, uploaded it on his YouTube channel Magneto 11, and got 1,000 views in two weeks. He used all his descriptions and tags knowledge, picked up from another YouTube video, to make sure his video ranked higher in searches.

At the time of filing this piece, that first modification video has over 5 lakh views.

“I knew from a long time that you could make money on YouTube and become popular,” Sharma tells VICE over the phone. “I named the channel ‘Magneto11’, because 11 is lucky number. I’m a Brahmin, so I believe in ankshastra (numerology) and Magneto because I love the character from the X-Men movies. Car design too, in a way, is a supernatural power like [that of] Magneto’s,” he added.

The channel became an instant hit. It has nearly four lakh subscribers today, with every video averaging nearly 80 lakh views. Sharma shoots, edits, and designs the cars, while Mansoori puts them together in his father’s garage. They even invested in a camera tripod for Rs 500. So the footage looks better now. It’s gotten so big, that Maruti 800 connoisseurs from other states, namely Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Punjab have gone to them to pimp their car. The Maruti 800 is the most influential automobile in Indian history, omnipresent on India’s roads for the last 30 years, a car that taught India how to drive. “One guy drove down his Maruti 2,000 km from Kashmir last month,” Mansoori tell us.

Sharma and Mansoori though, think their popularity is also because of their innovative design work, inspiration for much of which comes from an unusual place: Toys. “We watch Leepu and Pitbull , Counting Cars, CNBC Awaaz’s Overdrive, but the biggest resource is toys,” Sharma told VICE. “We Google different toys, with key words like, ‘Mini Hummer’, print out their pictures and get to work. Earlier it used to take us 30 to 45 days to modify one car; now we do it in 15,” he declares proudly.

Typically, their internet fame is hidden from their immediate family. Sharma works with his father in the day at a local furniture supply firm, and Mansoori works in his father’s garage. Both sets of parents don’t know what the word ‘subscriber’ means. Mansoori’s dad won’t even let him travel outside Barwani, so plans for ‘road trip videos’ are on hold.

The dudes, however, don’t care.

“We only ‘make’ Marutis because it’s what a lot of people drive in our area. Now we want to ‘make’ bigger cars,” Sharma told me. He also added that they’ve ‘made’ 24 cars in 14 months and haven’t had a single complaint. According to them it’s because, if, for example, they update a bumper, they do so keeping the original engine line and other things in mind. Which means that the car can be used as it was originally intended, without the modifications changing its standard operating procedure.

As proud as Sharma is of the design, Mansoori is just as jacked about the quality of his build. “Our cars are stronger than normal ones. The metal parts we’ve used are designed according to the initially designed centre of gravity, and I built it with stronger parts,” he says. “It’s so strong in fact, that you can throw it from 20 feet and it’ll still remain intact,” he claims.

He has promised to send a video of throwing a car from 20 feet.

Follow Parthshri Arora on Twitter.