Signature

Visiting a premium bike showroom is a rewarding experience in itself. You get to see so many of the grown ups gleefully posing on bikes, eager to get their hands on machines they could not own previously for various reasons ranging from nascent biking culture in India up to putting the family first and buying a car. After witnessing these reactions at Tusker Harley-Davidson here in Bangalore, I came back with mixed opinions.  For the sake of convenience, I decided to break down this write up into separate sections, so here we go. As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated.  Design, Build and Ergonomics Around the world, Harleys are known for their quintessential cruiser or muscle bike styling. While they are pin ups for boys of all ages, the 750 somehow does not cut it. Sure the tank is quite large and the tail section exudes a sense of modern design flair, but you get the impression that the designers had their hands tied, with a clear briefing to come up w...

The last few years have been a bit of a roller coaster ride for me. While I would prefer my bike to explore what this vast and beautiful country has to offer, I do understand that after repeated accidents, it's better to at least travel rather than curl up and hope for a quick recovery. In my previous travelogue I thought I was less than adventurous considering that I had the luxury of a roof, air conditioning and some gadgetry to get me around the western ghats. This time around, I was pampered to the maximum as I flew all the way to Mumbai, sat in very uneventful taxi rides and reached the comfort of home with little to no stress. However, learning comes to those who go looking for it and I guess we can always find something we can ponder over, rather than whine about missing how we get there. It all started when one of my cousins decided to come down to India via Mumbai. We thought we could all catch up there instead of roaming around familiar places in Bangalore. Not that t...

A quick glance at my phone told me that I was 38 minutes away from home; mostly because of traffic on the infamous outer ring road. To give you some idea, my commute from office to home is around 20 minutes considering I sometimes end up in rush hour, while in others I'm saved from the ever so angry fellow commuters. A side story to this is that I never really wanted to rely on technology so much. I was always grumbling at companies who treat our privacy as a means of making money through location based advertising or the general paranoia that others know where I am with little or no effort. While it's possible to track down every active cell phone no matter how basic, the degree to which I wanted to protect my location was a lot higher. A few years down the road, I have thrown caution to the wind and activated GPS antennas on all my devices; so Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook or who ever is related to them at any level can know where I am. Whether you subscribe to that ...