JOIN USDelhi to Goa on a Harley-Davidson
For media consultant Naveen Chopra, it was not another routine day of get-up-in-the morning, grab a bite and leave for work, but an eventful morning where he rode his dream bike Harley-Davidson and vroomed to Fortis Hospital in Gurgaon where his companions were waiting for him to join in the biking expedition.
The enthusiastic band of bikers are all participants of the two-day India Bike Week (IBW) which flags off today. Interestingly, it is not merely the destination but the journey and the adventure that compelled these bikers, some who have participated before also, to be part of the second edition of the festival.
Filled with nostalgia of his first bike, an RX 100, which his parents gifted him when he was “Seventeen or 18-years old”, Naveen says his “affection for motorbikes could not be hidden.”
“My father was an Army officer so we were born ‘bravehearts’. Still the thought of me driving from Delhi to Goa on a bike initially did make my family tense,” Naveen said while familiarising himself with an unfamiliar group of bikers, all holding helmets and wrapped in leather jackets and gloves.
Another biker, Dinesh Gupta, an iron and steel trader by profession and a biking enthusiast, could not restrain from saying that he had a “Lot of expectations from the first edition of IBW but the ride was more fun than what we witnessed at the venue. There were so many things going parallel that we could hardly make up our mind in terms of what to attend. Still, I decided to participate in the second edition because riding for long distance in a group is pure pleasure.”
A similar enthusiasm and vitality was palpable in the environment where mostly young boys dominated the biking scene. As they reminisced about their affairs with the bikes, Metrolife eavesdropped on some confessions.
“I was in class eight when I first rode my uncle’s Hero Honda in the neighbourhood,” said Brahm Mira, a digital artist who was happy to have bought his KTM Dupe 390 last November. “I missed biking for three years after moving back from Australia. Though not having a bike couldn’t curb my passion for biking, yet there is a whole lot of excitement that I have in my mind right now to explore Indian roads on my bike, with all safety measures in place.”
Brahm even put on hold his current projects, just like his biking comrades, to indulge in his passion and consume his mind with the “pleasures of the ride”. The organisers revealed that the biggest challenge was to influence bikers to take a nine-day off from their work and satisfy their families about all their safety concerns. Soon the air filled with the noise of howling engines even as the young bikers disappeared from sight, only to be found in Goa!