The Royal choice

Royal Enfield bikes have given birth to a motoring subculture. The bikers are head over heels in love with the thumping sound of their Enfield bikes and feel a sense of kinship towards those who share this passion. They stick together off the road — giving a leg-up to a fellow rider whose business is down in the dumps or a patient ear and lots of hand-holding to someone who has been through an emotional trauma

Seemingly innocent question, teenaged boy on a bicycle, small dusty village on NH 45. And considering I was on an RE 500, I smiled confidently and replied ‘nothing else in the country’! Little did I know I was being set up to be knocked down. The young chap had been strolling around my bike as I enjoyed the customary ‘chai’ at a local tea shop, his casual air of disinterest thinly concealing the gleam of admiration in his eyes. My answer was met with a disdainful smirk. ‘I saw a foreigner on a Yamaha last week. That was much bigger. He told me they’re going to make it in India. 1200 cc, and it was sooo (he stretched his arms out as far as they would go) big. When I'm old enough, that’s what I’m going to ride’. He gave my bike one last look out of the corner of his eye, then pedaled away nonchalantly on his creaky bicycle. Many kilometers down the road, and alone with my thoughts on the highway, I pondered his question. It was the classic mental pivot. Both ridiculously simplistic and unbelievably deep at the same time.‘What’s bigger than the Bullet?’In the old days, people bought a Bullet not because of displacement, size or weight, but for very different reasons. It was the ‘Raja Gadi’. The choice of real men. At least that was the picture Bullet advertising painted then, and a vivid and colourful picture it was, best viewed with the ‘Bullet meri jaan’ jingle playing in your head.Then about 15 years ago, the Jap Bike wars started. First there were the hundreds, then later the one-tens, the one-fifties, the one-seventy-fives… each claiming to deliver more power and ‘better mileage’, if that’s even possible at the same time, than the other. Buzz boxes abounded, tiddlers screamed manically on every street, and on another road far from where these marketing, R&D and advertising wars were being fought, the Grand Daddy of them all chugged steadily towards the brink of oblivion.Recently though, there seems to be have been a revival of sorts, at first glance, rather heartening to a die-hard British motorcycle enthusiast like me. It seems as though more people are waking up from their Jap drone-induced stupor, and noticing that there was always a bike that was ‘bigger’ than the plastic clad Jappos available in the country.