My first ride with Bikers' Creed.

तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय…

So, an interesting thing happened. After I rode for the first time with a group of avid bikers from the Knight Riderz Riding Club a fortnight ago, a ride that will last in my memories for a long time, and for good reasons, the club split, with the founders leaving to form their own new club called Bikers’ Creed. Now, to be honest, one group of bikers is much like another. There will be good people and bad people, good riders and dangerous ones, good rides and the comme-ci-comme-ça ones. But it so happened that literally every person I rode with a couple of Sundays back went with the original founders to the new club, and so, for me, it was a quick and easy decision to switch.

Today, the club had its first official ride. And if I were to be brutally honest, I’ll admit that while it was not as challenging as the previous one, nor as thrilling, it was steady, smooth, even a bit boring at times, which is not to mean that is a bad thing; boring is good on a heavy, touring kind of motorcycle like the Royal Enfield Interceptor 650 that I own and ride, especially when that ride comes with stunning views of the Panshet backwaters, a peacock (an entire muster of them, in fact) sighting, broken roads that are broken just about so without crossing over to the ‘off-road’ territory, brilliant, breezy, cool, just-threatening-to-rain-but-doesn’t weather, the rolling Sahyadris around you, and great company of over 2 dozen enthusiastic, hard-riding, backslapping-friendly bikers who are passionate about their motorcycles and motorcycling but not obsessed (meaning they can hold a conversation without having to bring motorcycles into it all the time). Yes, boring is good sometimes. And this was just such a time.

The route we followed was Abhiruchi Mall – Panshet – Kadave Khind – Vehle (Breakfast) – Nasrapur – Shindewadi, starting at about 0600h IST, and disbursing at around 1130h IST from just short of the Katraj tunnel. We had a small detour when the ride leader missed a turn on our way back, but it was all good in the end. An enjoyable little breakfast ride in the beautiful Sahyadri ranges that the Pune plateau is situated in the midst of.

But before you go, there is one thought I’d like to leave you with. And it came from a conversation some of my biker friends and I had at a lovely cafe in Bavdhan (The Fat Labrador Café). There were 4 or 5 of us, and holding forth on the issue of the rear wheel slipping and sliding over wet, oily, or gravelly roads was none other than Bacon Baba (Rahul Majumdar, an OG biker from the club) who said something so equally practical and profound that it bears repeating: ‘Your rear wheel going to slip. Take it as a given. It may be due to the road condition, the weather, the tyre condition, or your riding. It does not matter. You need to accept that it will skid and that you will not fall every time it does, especially if you are aware and conscious of it. You cannot stop it from skidding. You can only control your reaction to it, much like fear, as also, life itself. So, there’s one and only one way to react to it, and that is to own it. Own your skid. Own that biatch. And you’ll be a better person for that.’

Amen, Bacon Baba. Amen to that.